Research Contributing to Successful COVID-19 Vaccine Development
In This Video
- Galit Alter, PhD, is a principal investigator at the Ragon Institute of Massachusetts General Hospital, MIT and Harvard, and Samana Cay MGH Research Scholar
- Her research has informed the battle against SARS-CoV-2 and has been important for developing the critical insights into the antibody mechanisms that are essential to induce through vaccination to ultimately control and clear the infection
- Her work has also helped inform strategies to evaluate vaccines more effectively to ensure that the most effective antibody responses are elicited against the virus
Galit Alter, PhD, is a principal investigator at the Ragon Institute of Massachusetts General Hospital, MIT and Harvard, and Samana Cay MGH Research Scholar. Her research has informed the battle against CoV-2—has been important for developing the critical insights into the antibody mechanisms that are essential to induce through vaccination to ultimately control and clear the infection. Her work has also helped inform strategies to evaluate vaccines more effectively to ensure that the most effective antibody responses are elicited against the virus.
Subscribe to the latest updates from Advances in Motion
Transcript
System serology is a technology that has evolved over the last 15 years, really created and inspired by our lack of understanding of how vaccines provide protection from infection. The idea, or the dogma, is that a vaccine that induces antibodies will provide protection from infection but in fact, antibodies work to fight disease by recruiting the immune system to kill infected cells and the pathogen itself.
Dating back to March, we became very interested in understanding how antibodies provide protection against SARS-CoV-2 to help guide vaccine development and this is where we began to partner with folks here at Mass General, folks like Ed Ryan and Richelle Charles, that helped us collect samples from some of the sickest patients we had here in the ICUs.
What was fascinating, was that we saw these very different immunological trajectories and how individuals who survived infection were able to harness their antibodies to fight disease and once again what we found was that the antibodies that were the most protective against this virus were the antibodies that were able to essentially drive clearance and control of the virus as opposed to simply just blocking infection.
Our work has informed the battle against CoV-2—has been in developing the critical insights into the antibody mechanisms that are essential to induce through vaccination to ultimately control and clear the infection. Our work has also helped inform strategies to evaluate vaccines more effectively to ensure that the most effective antibody responses are elicited against the virus.
View all COVID-19 updates
Learn more about COVID-19 research at Mass General