Georgiev Lab News

The approach will address “bottlenecks” that slow the traditional antibody discovery process, and it aims to make it possible to generate monoclonal antibody therapies against any target of interest.

The discovery, reported in the journal PLOS Pathogens, could help open the door to the development of effective antibody therapies with an “exceptional breadth of pathogen coverage.”

Using a technique developed at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, researchers identified antibodies that are excellent leads as potential therapies for human parainfluenza virus 3, a leading cause of acute and potentially fatal respiratory illness.

Reporting Nov. 6 in Cell Reports Medicine, Ivelin Georgiev, PhD, and colleagues demonstrated that antibodies isolated from children’s blood samples displayed high levels of neutralization and potency against variants of the COVID-19 virus, SARS-CoV-2, even when the children had not previously been exposed to or treated for those variants.

More than a million people in the United States are living with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. One-fifth of them have been co-infected by the hepatitis C virus (HCV), which attacks the liver.

Researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, in collaboration with Takeda Inc., have reported a major advance in understanding and potentially preventing dengue, a devastating, mosquito-borne tropical viral infection that is spreading across the globe.

Vanderbilt’s Ivelin Georgiev, PhD, has received a three-year, $750,000 award from The G. Harold and Leila Y. Mathers Foundation of Rye Brook, New York, to support research aimed at rapidly identifying potent, disease-fighting antibodies.