Award
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) 1R21AI190832-01
Advancing the development of tools to better understand humoral responses to sapovirus following natural infections
Recipient
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Department of Internal Medicine
Award Amount
$427,625.00
Ceiling
$427,625.00
Awarded
September 09, 2025
Identifier
1R21AI190832-01
The award supports research to develop tools for understanding humoral immune responses to sapovirus in children, aiding vaccine development and natural immunity studies.
Description
This project aims to develop tools to better understand humoral immune responses to sapovirus, which is crucial for vaccine development and understanding natural immunity in children. Leveraging an NIH-funded birth cohort of 444 children in León, Nicaragua, this project aims to characterize the kinetics of neutralizing antibodies to sapovirus in longitudinal serum and stool samples collected from 50 children experiencing a sapovirus gastroenteritis episode during the first two years of life. The project will also test whether polyclonal sera neutralize homotypic and heterotypic sapovirus, compare neutralizing antibody levels between children who do and do not develop sapovirus AGE episodes, and determine the correlation between neutralizing antibody levels and levels of IgG and IgA as determined by enzyme immunoassays. This project will generate a new tool that will be shared with the scientific community and is fundamental for the understanding of natural humoral immunity to sapovirus.