Jason McLellan, 'Structure-based Vaccine Antigen Design' (ChemSem 7)

This is the Dwain L Ford Lecture Series in the Andrews University Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry 2023 spring seminar program (Mar. 2, 2023).

"Structure-based Vaccine Antigen Design," Jason McLellan, University of Texas at Austin

SPEAKER BIO:
Dr. Jason McLellan is the Welch Chair in Chemistry and Professor of Molecular Biosciences, at the University of Texas at Austin. He researches viral proteins, and his work to understand how these proteins are structured and how they function has factored into the development of vaccines and potential treatments for deadly viruses that have impacted the lives of billions of people. He is one of the inventors of a way to engineer a key protein in coronaviruses for use in vaccines. The technology his team developed can be found in many leading vaccines against COVID-19 (Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson and Johnson and Novavax). McLellan and his colleagues also designed key proteins that form the basis of several vaccines now in clinical trials against the coronavirus, as well as separate proteins used in vaccines against respiratory syncytial virus, a virus especially dangerous for young children and seniors.

He is the winner of multiple scientific awards, including the National Academy of Sciences Award in Molecular Biology, the Welch Foundation Norman Hackerman Award in Chemistry, the William Prusoff Memorial Award from the International Society for Antiviral Research and the Viruses Young Investigator in Virology Prize, among others. His research and expertise have been featured in multiple media outlets including CNN, Fox News, USA Today, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post and National Geographic. Dr. McLellan earned a B.S. in chemistry with an emphasis in biochemistry from Wayne State University and his PhD from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He conducted his postdoctoral research at the National Institutes of Health's Vaccine Research Center. After serving on the faculty at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth in the Department of Biochemistry for five years, he moved his laboratory to the University of Texas at Austin in 2018, where he serves as a tenured faculty member and associate chair for graduate education in the Department of Molecular Biosciences.

ABSTRACT:
During this presentation I will discuss my laboratory’s collaborative work understanding the structure and function of coronavirus spike proteins, and how we leveraged this information to design novel vaccine antigens that are in four leading COVID-19 vaccines. I will also describe how we were able to rapidly determine the structure of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein in early 2020 and leverage that information into the design of second-generation spikes that are more stable and express better than our initial antigen. I will also discuss our recent work on S2-only antigens and human antibodies that bind to it.