The overall goal of this application is to develop a new, more effective live-attenuated influenza vaccine (LAIV) capable of eliciting broadly cross-protective immune responses to conserved internal viral proteins - thereby providing the basis for a universal influenza vaccine.

The overall goal of this NYICE project is to determine the natural history of how influenza B virus (IBV) broadly neutralizing human monoclonal antibodies (BNhmAbs) are induced in response to seasonal vaccination and their ability to prevent IBV infection and transmission, and their mechanism of action. This knowledge will provide the basis for the development of immunotherapeutics to fill the existing gap for treatments against IBV.

This project will characterize the safety, immunogenicity and protective efficacy of selected rLCMV/ts in mice.This contract involves virulence, immunogenecity and protective efficacy studies.

Morbidity and mortality associated with human mammarenavirus infections involve a failure of the host's innate immune response to restrict virus multiplication at early stages of infection, thus compromising the initiation of an effective innate and adaptive immune response to control and eliminate the virus. Studies in this application will provide a better understanding of arenavirus-host innate defense interactions, which can facilitate the development of novel strategies to combat human pathogenic mammarenaviruses.

We will generate stocks of influenza pandemic A/California/04/09 H1N1 (pH1N1) and A/Wyoming/3/03 H3N2 influenza A viruses as well as influenza B/Brisbane/60/08 mCherry-expressing viruses that will be used to optimize the performance of PRESCIENT (Aim 1), to test the working hypothesis that PRESCIENT can identify in a mixed population of individual human hybridoma cells neutralizing antibodies against pH1N1 virus (Aim 2) and to identify influenza A H1N1, H3N2; and B virus neutralizing antibodies from EBV-immortalized patient-derived B cells (Aim 3).

Our goal is to exploit under-utilized museum collections with molecular tools to understand the natural history of zoonotic pathogens transmitted by rodents. In AIM1 we will use a PCR-based method to identify rodents infected with human-parasitic schistosomes. In AIM2 we will use a sequence-capture array to identify individuals infected with major human pathogens that can describe the expansion and contraction of zoonoses across the landscape and through time.

To obtain funds for Ms. Angelica Olmo-Fontanez to cover her research in Aging and tuberculosis in Dr. Torrelles laboratory.

The proposed studies aimed at understanding the molecular mechanisms underlying B-cell dysfunction and developing novel immune modulation strategies to decrease inflammation and B-cell dysfunction could have a significant impact on the course of HIV infection, as well as a number of other autoimmune chronic inflammatory diseases associated with B-cell defects.

The goal of this research is to understand how the Rv2623 protein of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacterial pathogen that causes tuberculosis, regulates growth of this bacterium in an infected person, including in the context of the development of a dormant/latent infection, with the ultimate goal of designing novel treatment for tuberculous infection.