Duke CIVIC Vaccine Center (DCVC)
About
The Duke CIVIC Vaccine Center (DCVC) uses its record of success in vaccine design and the expertise of its collaborative network to improve influenza vaccine candidates and platforms with innovative technologies. Using state of the art approaches, including antibody sequence analysis, DCVC investigators inform immunogen design, formulate novel vaccine candidates, and perform testing in pre-clinical models to assess immunogenicity and protection against infectious challenge. The DCVC continually refines targets by testing the same viral antigens across different platforms. These novel delivery systems include lipid nanoparticles containing nucleoside-modified mRNA, dual-HA expressing virions presenting multiple epitopes for antibody targeting, and structure-based modifications of influenza glycoproteins to target immunity to conserved regions of the virus. The best vaccine candidates advance into pre-clinical and clinical testing to assess how well they induce robust immune responses and protect against influenza in humans.
Investigators
Duke University
- Nicholas Heaton, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology
- Guido Ferrari, MD, Professor, Department of Surgery
- Andrew Macintyre, PhD, Associate Professor in Medicine
- Herman Staats, PhD, Professor of Pathology
- Georgia Tomaras, PhD, Professor, Department of Surgery
- Fan Yuan, PhD, Professor, Department of Biomedical Engineering
Boston Children’s Hospital
- Stephen Harrison, PhD, Professor, Department of Basic Medical Sciences
Case Western Reserve University
- Stephanie Langel, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Pathology, Center for Global Health and Diseases, School of Medicine
InvVax
- Arthur Young, PhD, President and CEO
Mass General Hospital
- Aaron Schmidt, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Microbiology
Najít Technologies, Inc.
- Ian Amanna, PhD, Associate Vice President for Research
- Mark Slifka, PhD, President, CSO
University of Pennsylvania
- Scott Hensley, PhD, Professor, Department of Microbiology
- Drew Weissman, MD, PhD, Professor, Department of Medicine
University of Pittsburgh
- Kevin McCarthy, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics
University of Texas – Austin
- George Georgiou, PhD, Professor, Department of Chemical Engineering
- Allison Seeger, PhD, Research Scientist
Wake Forest School of Medicine
- Martha Alexander-Miller, PhD, Professor, Department of Microbiology and Immunology
Other Key Personnel
Program Managers
- Hilary Bouton-Verville, MS, PMP, Senior Scientific Program Leader, Duke Human Vaccine Institute
- Chris Todd, MPH, Director of Program Management, Duke Human Vaccine Institute
- Ryan Bushey, PhD, MBA, Scientific Program Leader
- Sally Chopra, PhD, Program Manager
The DCVC group has a long track record of successful collaboration in vaccine design through projects such as the Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology (under Dr. Barton Haynes), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Pandemic Prevention Platform (P3) (under Dr. Greg Sempowski), and in a Boston Children’s Hospital-based P01 grant focused on structural studies of B cell repertoires induced by influenza infection and vaccination.
