Variant-Resistant Antibody Recognition from a Global Consortium

Presented By: Erica Ollmann Saphire, PhD
Speaker Biography: Erica Ollmann Saphire, Ph.D. is the President and CEO and also a Professor at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology. Her research explains, at the molecular level, how and why viruses like Ebola and Lassa are pathogenic and provides the roadmap for medical defense. Her team has solved the structures of the Ebola, Sudan, Marburg and Lassa virus glycoproteins, explained how they remodel these structures as they drive themselves into cells, how their proteins suppress immune function and where human antibodies can defeat these viruses. Dr. Saphire, herself, solved the first crystal structure of the entire human antibody, revealing at the same time, the hexameric assembly by which the IgG activates the complement cascade for immune protection. Another discovery from her lab expanded the central dogma of molecular biology by proving that certain viral proteins actually rearrange into different structures at different times for different functions....
Webinar: Variant-Resistant Antibody Recognition from a Global Consortium
Webinar Abstract: Coronavirus Immunotherapeutic Consortium (CoVIC) is an international effort to conduct side-by-side, apples-to-apples comparisons of leading therapeutic antibody candidates against the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein contributed by a range of large and small companies and academic labs on multiple continents. All antibodies contributed to the CoVIC are first sent to the La Jolla Institute Immunology (LJI) where they are blinded through the assignment of code names. The coded antibodies are sent to seven different partner reference labs for analyses of different antibody activities including in vivo protection in mouse and hamster models of infection, affinity for spike protein, high resolution epitope binning, ability to block ACE-2 binding, neutralization of pseudovirus and authentic virus infection in cell culture, risk of mutagenic escape, and Fc-mediated immune effector function. All data generated by the reference labs will be deposited in a publicly available database that will have tools for analysis of relationships among the different antibody features. The CoVIC represents a unique opportunity to gather together antibodies that originated from a variety of sources, including COVID-19 survivors and in silico design, to compile a body of information that can inform early and next-generation antibody therapies having high potency and resistance to viral mutagenic escape.
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