Our Lab's Vision

As our world grows more interconnected and humans impinge on the few remaining wild habitats, infections caused by the accidental transmission of viruses from their natural animal hosts to humans are increasingly of concern. The unprecedented 2013–2015 Ebola virus disease epidemic in western Africa and the 2020–202X COVID-19 pandemic provide apt examples. Few specific antiviral treatments are available for most emerging agents, and our ability to develop them is challenged by a poor understanding of exactly how viruses co-opt our own cells at the molecular level.

The Chandran Lab at Einstein strives to understand this molecular warfare between virus and cell, and to apply what we learn to the development of antiviral countermeasures, including vaccines and antibody-based therapeutics. Our work encompasses many different viruses, which we study because they are important disease-causing agents, represent potential epidemic or pandemic threats, provide useful tools to study viruses, cells, and disease, or simply because they present interesting biological puzzles to solve. These include filoviruses like Ebola virus and Marburg virus, hantaviruses like Nombre virus and Hantaan virus, nairoviruses like Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever virus, coronaviruses like SARS-CoV-2 and emerging bat-borne agents, flaviviruses like yellow fever virus and Powassan virus, and poxviruses like mpox.

Working collaboratively with our partners on three continents, we have helped uncover critical host factors required for cell invasion, including the long-sought Ebola receptor, Niemann-Pick C1 (NPC1) and the New World hantavirus receptor, PCDH1, and are investigating how viruses subvert them for infection. In other recent studies, we have investigated how genetic variation in viral proteins and host-encoded factors—in NPC1, for example—can influence the susceptibility of humans and animals to viral infection and the likelihood of animal-to-human 'host-jumping' events.

We and our partners in academia, industry, and government are also intensively engaged in translational studies to develop small molecule- and antibody-based therapeutics that leverage basic knowledge on viral invasion. An important new development in the Chandran Lab is our work as part of the Prometheus consortium to mine the immune responses of people who have been infected by emerging viruses. From these responses, we unearth monoclonal antibodies. We use these monoclonal antibodies as tools to understand how viruses work and to find those rare ‘rainbow unicorns’ that can be turned into treatments. We also make them available to the broader research community.

We are also extremely interested in engineering antibody-like molecules that can do things natural antibodies cannot—like targeting two different parts of a virus at the same time—to develop new antiviral treatments and gain new insights into how viruses function as molecular machines of exquisite complexity.

Learn more by clicking on Research and Publications, watch videos explaining our science, meet the people behind the data, and check out News & Media for recent developments. And of course, feel free to drop us a line or drop on by (but note that we might put you to work!).