4/ The photo is one of my favorites of David. In his lab, circa 1971, the era of the reverse transcriptase discoveries.

For those interested in a deeper dive:
a.co/d/cOKmZWx

3/ Many of his trainees have gone on to be leaders in their fields for decades, elected to the National Academies, and been heads of universities.

2/ There were those who said he should have easily won two Nobel Prizes. He had a tumultuous tenure as President of Rockefeller University, followed by a highly success tenure as President of Caltech. Perhaps his most enduring legacy is the incredible cadre of scientists who trained in his lab

1/ David Baltimore passed away this weekend. He was one of the greatest biologists of the past 100 years. He made extraordinary contributions to immunology, cancer, molecular biology, virology, HIV, biochemistry, genetics, and genetic engineering. He won the Nobel prize in Medicine at age 37.

Rest in peace, David Baltimore. explorers.com/david-baltim... @nationalacademies.org
@nobelprize.bsky.social

A germline-targeting trimer consistently induced rare bnAb-like precursors specific for the HIV Env Apex in rhesus macaques @sciimmunology.bsky.social @profshanecrotty.bsky.social War ad & Schief
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

A good news article in Nature today following up on these papers
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

“The field has made enormous progress in the last two or three years, and this is a reward for the investments that the federal government has made in these programs,” said Dennis Burton, @scripps.edu .

“Now is not the time to end these efforts,” warned Burton.

Amazing work led by Bill Schief at Scripps and Moderna, with the great Julie McElrath heading the clinical trial, and Parham Ramezani-Rad of @lji.org and Cottrell leading the monkey vaccine study.

In fact, the human results were even better, which is encouraging that vaccine strategies passing these tests in monkeys are great candidates for human clinical trials.

And the animal models show how important animals models can be for vaccine studies for predictive power. In the monkeys, this was the first time an RNA vaccine elicited HIV neutralizing antibodies.*

3x vax with membrane-bound trimers elicited neutralization in 80% of vax.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

After 30+ years of HIV vaccine clinical trials, this is the first time that neutralizing antibodies against an HIV clinical isolate has been generated in vaccinated people.

* "Tier 2" neutralizing antibodies, induced consistently.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Preprint: Local B-cell immunity and durable memory following live-attenuated influenza intranasal vaccination of humans @profshanecrotty.bsky.social @hannahdstacey.bsky.social
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

This project was led by postdoc @hannahdstacey.bsky.social in the lab, supported by the amazing core facilities @lji.org and done in collaboration with Dr. Florian Krammer @Icahn School of Medicine.

Beyond flu, intranasal platforms are also being develop for a range of pathogens.

Understanding immune dynamics at the tissue site, and being able to directly measure them in humans, may dramatically improve development of vaccines that elicit robust protection against respiratory viruses.

These findings demonstrate that FluMist is much more immunogenic in adults than generally thought.

It also highlights the value of directly sampling mucosal tissues.

Intranasal vaccination is being explored as a platform for next-generation and universal influenza vaccines.

Vaccine-specific cells in the upper airways of FluMist recipients showed recent activation (CD27+CD21-). No such activation was seen in the blood following FluMist, or in the upper airway following intramuscular vaccination, suggesting a local origin of the upper airway B cell responses.

Flumist essentially does not induce circulating antibodies in adults. But in the current study, we demonstrate substantial upper airway memory B cells in individuals who received the FluMist vaccine.

We previously demonstrated that high quality swabbing can evaluate of mucosal immune memory in the context of SARS-CoV-2 breakthrough infections.
doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Nasal vaccines aim to make local immunity, at the site of respiratory virus infection. However, establishing correlates of protection for intranasal vaccines remains a significant challenge, in part due to accessibility of relevant tissues.
doi.org/10.1038/s415...

In our new study we show local B-cell immunity and durable memory following live-attenuated influenza intranasal vaccination of humans. We utilized minimally invasive swabbing of human upper airway, following seasonal intramuscular or nasal (FluMist) flu vaccinations
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...