HRHR Program Update and Session 5

Antibody discovery technologies have led to hundreds of clinical-stage and approved biologics, and potent antibodies are accelerating structure-based vaccine designs. However, functional antibody analyses have mostly been restricted to a small number of high-affinity antibodies, providing limited molecular design feedback and obscuring large-scale data features. To address these issues, we recently developed a suite of high-throughput platforms for paired antibody heavy and light chain sequencing and functional analysis, providing a new window to study human antibody development that informs effective antibody discovery and design.
We established an in vitro display system to screen natively paired human antibody heavy and light chains for their function and understand infectious disease responses, including against HIV-1 and COVID-19. We are also performing detailed analyses of the potential antibody mutation landscape to understand the critical features of antiviral antibody potency and neutralization breadth. Finally, we will provide new data that suggests a mechanism for MHC-II-based immune personalization, with high relevance to human antibody development and protein drug design. These high-throughput experimental and computational studies are revealing new quantitative principles that shape human antibody immunity and outline several strategies to accelerate protein drug discovery.

Click Here for Recorded Presentation

Science faces an accessibility challenge. Although information/knowledge is fast becoming available to everyone around the world, the experience of science is significantly limited. One approach to solving this challenge is to democratize access to scientific tools. I will briefly discuss broad philosophy of "Frugal science" that inspires design, development, and deployment of ultra-affordable yet powerful scientific tools for the masses. Using examples from my own work (Foldscope: one-dollar origami microscope, Paperfuge: a twenty-cent high-speed centrifuge, Octopi: spectral imaging based malaria diagnostics, SnapDx: a low cost molecular home diagnostics, Vectorchip: High-throughput molecular surveillance of mosquitoes; Abuzz: citizen science based mosquito tracking),I will describe the process of identifying challenges, designing solutions, and deploying these tools globally to enable open ended scientific curiosity/inquiries in communities around the world. By connecting the dots between science education, global health and environmental monitoring, he will explore the role of "simple" tools in advancing access to better human and planetary health in a resource limited world.

Click Here for Recorded Presentation

Over the past several decades, the concept of 3D printed artificial human organs ("bioprinting") has energized regenerative engineering, capturing attention of both scientists and the general public alike. However, as the bioprinting field has matured, substantive roadblocks have become increasingly apparent. First, it is now clear that our field still needs three-dimensional spatial maps – or "blueprint" – of human organs, down to the cellular and molecular levels and across organ scale. Without a blueprint, it is not possible to accurately build. Second, the field needs integrative technologies for recapitulating these spatial cellular and molecular features within artificial human organs. I will describe my lab's work in building molecular and cellular "blueprints" of human tissues, as well as in developing new advanced fabrication and cellular methods for tissue construction. Here, I will focus on our efforts to uncover molecular-level information by attaining transcriptomic organ maps, and to develop technologies for encoding spatiogenetic wiring in human artificial tissues. I will also take a moment to reflect and provide data supporting the idea that if we as a profession are to engineer medical advances that equitably improve the lives of all people, our profession needs to prioritize including all people. Diversifying our profession is the engine of innovation and creativity needed to bring us forward into the 21st century.

Click Here for Recorded Presentation