Einstein Magazine profiles our work on the development of a broadly active human antibody therapeutic cocktail against Ebola virus and related agents in their feature entitled “Translating Discoveries Into Therapies.” This cocktail is being developed by our biotech partner Mapp Bio with support from the US Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA).
Read our paper in Science Translational Medicine describing our work on the isolation of human monoclonal antibodies against the glycoprotein spikes of rodent-borne hantaviruses associated with severe human disease in Northern Europe. Our investigations led us to a single antibody that is a promising candidate for clinical development as a broad countermeasure against hantaviruses. The way this antibody binds to the hantavirus spike also informs the development of broadly protective hantavirus vaccines.
This work was the product of our NIH-funded international consortium, Prometheus, whose goal is to to develop antibody-based therapies against hantaviruses and other highly lethal viruses for which there are no approved vaccines or treatments.
Co-led by Eva Mittler in the lab (Team).
Learn more about the implications of our findings here.
See this New York Times story for more on Prometheus and watch a video about the Prometheus team.
Read our paper in PLoS Pathogens describing our work to develop a computational model that uses immunological and standard clinical biomarkers to predict patient outcomes. We found that data collected during hospitalization—including spike-protein antibody levels as well as white blood cell, neutrophil, and lymphocyte counts—more accurately predicted whether or not COVID-19 patients would live or die.
Co-led by Gorka Lasso in the lab (Team).
See more here.
Read our paper in Cell Host & Microbe describing our work on the the human antibody response induced by the widely used yellow fever vaccine.
Yellow fever is a mosquito-borne viral infection with no known treatment that affects some 200,000 people each year in Africa and South America. The disease has been surging in recent years, including an epidemic in Brazil in 2017-19 that was the largest outbreak in 70 years. Current yellow fever vaccines are based on a virulent African strain of the virus and considered to be equally effective against all yellow fever variants, including the emerging Brazilian strain.
In this paper, we report that the yellow fever vaccine has reduced activity against the recent Brazilian strain. Similar to what we have seen with the COVID-19 variants of concern, we show that the Brazilian strain (and most other South American strains) have undergone key amino acid changes that make them less susceptible to vaccine-induced neutralization. Our research provides a roadmap to improve assessments of the antiviral antibody response in South American vaccines and for developing next-generation yellow fever vaccines.
Led by Denise Haslwanter in the lab (Team).
See the story here, and watch our appearance on This Week in Virology (TWiV) hosted by Dr. Vincent Racaniello to discuss this work.
Dr. J. MAXIMILIAN FELS
Congrats to Max for receiving the 2021 Dennis Shields Postdoctoral Prize at Einstein. He was recognized for his work to discover and develop human antibody-based therapeutics against Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever virus (CCHFV).
The title of his talk was: “Protective Neutralizing Antibodies From Human Survivors of Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever.”
See our amazing team here.
Read our paper in Cell describing our work on the discovery and development of a a monoclonal antibody-based therapy against Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever virus (CCHFV), a highly virulent tick-borne pathogen affecting eastern and southern Europe, Africa, the Middle East, India, and Central Asia.
This work was the product of our NIH-funded international consortium, Prometheus, whose goal is to to develop antibody-based therapies against CCHFV and three other highly lethal viruses for which there are no approved vaccines or treatments.
Co-led by Max Fels in the lab (Team).
Learn more about the implications of our findings here.
See this New York Times story for more on Prometheus and watch a video about the Prometheus team.
Drs. M. Eugenia Dieterle and Denise Haslwanter
Congrats to Denise and Euge for receiving the 2020 Dennis Shields Postdoctoral Prize at Einstein. They were recognized for their work to develop a VSV-based surrogate viral system to study the SARS-2 coronavirus.
Their presentation was entitled "A Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing: Surrogate Viral System for Rapid Discovery and Characterization of COVID-19 Therapeutics."
See our amazing team here.
The New York Times profiles the work of our Prometheus consortium to discover a potent and broad anti-coronavirus antibody treatment.
When COVID-19 came to NYC in the spring of 2020, most labs at Einstein were shut down, but we were allowed to keep working with half of our team, under the condition that we switched our entire program to the emergency COVID response. Thus, the ‘COVID Crew’ was born. Pretty soon, we were busier than we could ever have imagined …
Einstein Magazine features our work to ‘spike the coronavirus’ during those early, traumatic days of COVID-19.
PhD and MD/PhD students in our lab were key players in our response and their efforts are profiled in the same issue.
One year into the pandemic, I spoke with our Dean, Dr. Gordon Tomaselli, and my amazing colleagues at Einstein and Montefiore, Drs. Liise-anne Pirofski and Michelle Gong, about our involvement in the COVID-19 response at our institution, our experiences, and what we thought was to come.
Image courtesy D. Haslwanter
Read our paper in Cell Host & Microbe describing a surrogate system for SARS-2 coronavirus entry that is proving useful for the profiling of immune responses and the development of antiviral therapeutics.
Co-led by Drs. Rohit Jangra, Euge Dieterle, and Denise Haslwanter in the lab (Team).
More coverage of this work is here.
April 3, 2019—(BRONX, N.Y.)—The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) has awarded an international consortium led by Albert Einstein College of Medicine a five-year, $22 million grant to develop antibody-based therapies against four highly lethal viruses for which there are no approved vaccines or treatments.
The viruses are the tick-borne Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever virus (CCHFV) and three hantaviruses, which are spread by rodents: Andes virus (ANDV), Sin Nombre virus (SNV), and Puumala virus (PUUV). The NIAID has designated all but PUUV as Category A agents—emerging infectious diseases or pathogens that pose the highest risk to national security and public health.
The project, called the Prometheus Center for Excellence in Translational Research (Prometheus), focuses on viruses that spread from animals to people. It builds on a 2017 study involving ebolaviruses, believed to spread to people from fruit bats or primates. In addition to Einstein, the participating institutions leading the project are the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), Mapp Biopharmaceutical, Inc., The University of Texas at Austin, and Adimab, LLC, a biotech company.
Read more about Prometheus and watch a video about our team and work.
Our back-to-back papers in Cell Host & Microbe describe the development of an antibody cocktail that can protect animals against all three ebolaviruses associated with human disease outbreaks. This cocktail, MBP134, has set new benchmarks in both antiviral breadth and therapeutic efficacy.
Our industrial partner, Mapp Biopharmaceutical, is developing MBP134 for human use in collaboration with the U.S. Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA). in rodent and large-animal models of lethal ebolavirus disease.
This work represents the efforts of an amazing international consortium of scientists from academia, government, and industry, including Einstein, Mapp Biopharmaceutical, Adimab LLC, Public Health Agency of Canada, United States Army Medical Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), University of Texas-Medical Branch, and Massachusetts General Hospital. Stay tuned for more exciting work from our posse!
Go here for my Q&A about our findings and their importance for developing a broadly protective therapy against ebolavirus disease.
Read an independent take on our work here.
Check out highlights of our work to discover a new receptor for hantaviruses that cause severe pulmonary syndrome (HPS) in the New World on the Einstein and NIH websites. We believe that this receptor could provide a target for the development of therapeutics to protect against HPS.
This study is a great example of the power of dispersed collaborative teams to do interdisciplinary science. The Chandran Lab’s Rohit Jangra and other lab members drove these efforts, but other labs from three continents also played key roles. Thank you to John Dye, Zhongde Wang, Thijn Brummelkamp, Jason Moffat, Félix Rey, Nicole Tischler, Dev Sidhu, and Jon Lai and all of their participating group members for making this happen.
Listen to Rohit and me discuss our new discovery on the This Week in Virology (TWiV) podcast with Dr. Vincent Racaniello and colleagues.
Read about the quest to glimpse the molecular details of Lassa virus glycoprotein in complex with human neutralizing antibodies by our collaborators at the Saphire Lab.
The Chandran Lab’s Lara Kleinfelter helped elucidate the mode of action of the human antibodies by demonstrating inhibition of viral fusion in cells through stabilization of the pre-fusion conformation of the Lassa virus glycoprotein.
Check out a highlight of our work on pan-ebolavirus neutralizing antibodies in the NIH Research Matters newsletter.
“Since it’s impossible to predict which of these agents will cause the next epidemic, it would be ideal to develop a single therapy that could treat or prevent infection caused by any known ebolavirus,” - Zach Bornholdt, PhD
Read about how our NIAID-funded study could lead to broad, versatile treatments for many different Ebolaviruses.
Researchers funded in part by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), have studied the blood of an Ebola survivor, searching for human antibodies that might effectively treat not only people infected with Ebola virus, but those infected with related viruses as well. Now the researchers have identified two such antibodies that hold promise as Ebola treatments.
A research preview by Seiya Yamayoshi and Yoshihiro Kawaoka in Cell, describing two of our collaborative stories published in the May 18, 2017 issue of the journal.
Read here and here about how our work helps expand the understanding of the key conserved vulnerability sites across divergent viral glycoproteins and inform design of next generation immunotherapy.
Commentary in Nature highlights the power of cross-institutional collaborations and lessons learned by the team as they make headway on finding better treatments for Ebola virus infection. The Chandran Lab is an integral part of the Viral Hemorrhagic Fever Immunotherapeutic Consortium, contributing key functional assays that characterize neutralization activity of monoclonal antibodies and help predict their therapeutic potential.
In our new paper in Science, we describe a new therapeutic strategy to target a hidden Achilles’ heel shared by all known types of Ebola virus. This strategy relies on our development of unique bispecific antibodies that like the mythical "Trojan horse," trick Ebola into carrying the means of its own destruction into host cells. See the press release here and a perspective on our work published in Science here.
Led by Anna Wec in the lab (Team).
