Parker Jamieson

The HIV-1 vaccine field has gone through several significant paradigm shifts, with recent years seeing an overwhelming push toward “rational” immunogen design that incorporates information about known broadly neutralizing antibodies (bNAbs), their epitopes on HIV-1 Env, and the bNAb-epitope interactions. A significant challenge that has hindered the development of an effective HIV-1 vaccine is the limited ability to study antibody responses to vaccination. In particular, current approaches for characterizing antibody responses to vaccination are limited in their ability to generate high-resolution antigen specificity information linked to antibody sequence, thus providing an incomplete understanding of the types and specificities of vaccine-elicited antibody repertoires. This issue is particularly pronounced in the context of multivalent vaccines, since it prevents a detailed understanding of cross-specific vs. strain-specific antibody responses to the different components of the candidate vaccine. To address this issue, we recently developed LIBRA-seq, a technology that enables high-throughput mapping of antibody sequence to antigen specificity for a theoretically unlimited number of antigens, from a single next-generation sequencing experiment. Parker’s project will focus on applying the LIBRA-seq technology to the characterization of antibody responses to vaccination with multivalent immunogens. These efforts will lead to new insights into how the human immune system responds to multivalent vaccines that incorporate a cocktail of multiple different HIV-1 strains.

Mentor: Ivelin Georgiev, Ph.D.