“We want to learn all that we can about viruses, such as mumps, so that we can rapidly pivot to work on closely related viruses with pandemic potential that have not yet emerged,” said Paul Duprex, Ph.D., co-leader of one of the newly funded projects and director of Pitt’s Center for Vaccine Research (CVR). “Our vision is to develop novel, rapid, generalizable vaccination approaches that are transferable in a potential future public emergency. This is pandemic preparedness in a nutshell.” 

Researchers from the Pitt CVR will focus their efforts on one or two prototype viruses from four virus families:

• Duprex, also professor of microbiology and molecular genetics and director of the Regional Biocontainment Laboratory at Pitt, will co-lead the study of paramyxoviruses, a family that includes measles and mumps viruses;
• Amy Hartman, Ph.D., associate professor of infectious diseases and microbiology, will co-lead the study of bunyaviruses, a family that includes Rift Valley fever virus;
• William Klimstra, Ph.D., professor of immunology, will co-lead the study of alphaviruses, a family that includes Eastern equine encephalitis virus;
• Anita McElroy, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor of pediatrics, will lead the Immunology Core that will support development and optimization of tools to analyze performance of vaccine candidates and monoclonal antibodies against selected prototype viruses.

In addition, research assistant professor of microbiology and molecular genetics Linda Murphy, Ph.D., assistant professor of microbiology and molecular genetics Kevin McCarthy, Ph.D., and associate professor of immunology Jishnu Das, Ph.D., will be involved in supporting various functions of the project.

Insights from studying prototype viruses will be used to develop and evaluate vaccine platforms and antibody-based treatment approaches that can be rapidly adapted to generate safe and effective vaccines and drugs for other members of the virus families in case of an emerging pandemic. The “prototype pathogens” model is similar to the one that led to accelerated development of vaccines against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that caused the COVID-19 pandemic, by building on earlier work on the Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV).

The research program is intended to develop a dynamic pipeline that will bring vaccine and monoclonal antibody candidates from the design and production stage through laboratory and preclinical studies and into eventual human trials.

The pipeline will follow three main stages: optimization, prioritization and down-selection. Following the design and production of protein and mRNA vaccine candidates as well as monoclonal antibodies against the prototypic viruses from the four virus families, the efficacy of those candidates in protecting against the infection will be tested in laboratory settings. The candidates that pass the initial screen will be entered into the next stage of preclinical testing in animals. Vaccine candidates that elicit immune response and monoclonal antibodies that provide protection against infection will be moved into the last stage of the project testing a generalizable strategy for pandemic preparedness.