Congratulations to Dr. Georgia Tomaras and her Immunological Sciences Laboratory at the Duke University Center for Human Systems Immunology (CHSI), Department of Surgery for being recognized as a ‘Highly Commended for the Best Academic Research Team at the Annual Vaccine Innovation Excellence (ViE) awards at The World Vaccine Congress in Washington, DC. The ViE award celebrates the industry’s most outstanding achievements by honoring and generating recognition of the efforts, accomplishments, and positive contributions of companies, individuals, and teams across 13 categories in the vaccine industry. Dr. Tomaras's group was recognized as Highly Commended from a highly competitive list of finalists nominated for this year's ViE awards, recognizing her Lab's contributions and efforts with their partners and industry collaborators toward the collective goal of identifying antibody correlates of protection for improving vaccines for some of the most challenging infectious diseases like HIV, Malaria, and COVID-19.
The recognition is based on research productivity, diversity of serological analysis for vaccine trials, and initiatives to advance vaccine research. Highlights of key initiatives and achievements over the past year include:
- Pioneering and advancing the antibody dynamics and functional platform to enable serology approaches to identify vaccine correlates of protection.
- Characterizing HIV antibody specificity, durability, and recall response of immunogens for enhancing the correlates of decreased HIV-1 risk.
- Identifying consistent vaccine correlates of protection for the WHO-recommended RTS,S, and R21 malaria vaccines.
- Identification of concentration monoclonal antibody correlates for HIV prevention.
- Biophysical measures of monoclonal malaria antibodies critical for decision making to advance toward clinical development.
- Assay technology and know-how transfer of Binding Antibody Multiplex Assay (BAMA) with good clinical laboratory practice (GCLP) and data analytics.
These and other contributions from Dr. Tomaras's lab have led to the advancement of several vaccine and biologics programs to the subsequent stages of translation and product development pipelines. Congratulations again, team Tomaras!
