Main Conference Day 2Tuesday, 16 December 2025 - PT (Pacific Time, GMT-08:00)

Monoclonal antibodies have recently been shown to prevent malaria in clinical trials in endemic regions, but challenges remain regarding antibody cost, potency, and specificity. Here, we describe the discovery of next-generation antibodies that target the malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, as part of efforts to develop new anti-malarial vaccines and prophylactics.

Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) causes a substantial respiratory disease burden in older adults. Three vaccines, each based on a prefusion-stabilized RSV F antigen, have now been licensed. Here, we delineate the humoral response elicited by Moderna’s RSV mRNA vaccine, characterizing antibody responses at both the polyclonal serum and single-B-cell levels.

TfR1 shuttles show promise for CNS therapeutics, but toxicities remain limiting. We introduce a high-throughput in vivo screening method to engineer novel brain shuttles. Powered by AI and Manifold's protein barcoding technology, our approach reveals novel shuttle targets and shuttles with enhanced tissue selectivity, reduced toxicity profiles, and optimized biodistribution.

Immune organoids model key features of human adaptive immunity, including antigen-specific antibody responses. Immune organoids are derived from lymphoid tissues and recapitulate the diversity of human immune responses. This talk will discuss the utility of the organoid model for investigating host and antigen format factors that influence the magnitude and quality of the antibody response.

As a critical step towards uncovering the extent and functional consequences of germline-encoded variation in adaptive immune receptor genes, we developed an ultra-high throughput multiplexed sequencing technique, ImmuneDiscover. This approach allows individualized immunoglobulin (IG) genotyping from nanogram quantities of genomic DNA and multiplexing >1,000 individuals in a single analysis. We benchmarked the approach on 90 donors from different population groups and subsequently genotyped 2,486 cases from the Thousand Genomes Project (1KGP) collection, creating an atlas of human IG gene variation, KIARVA. All alleles were validated against existing SNP databases from >million individuals using IgSNPer. We found extensive population differences in IG genes known to be important in pathogen responses, including a homozygous multigene IGHD segment deletion present in up to 30% of East Asian individuals. In addition, we show evidence of disease responsive haplotypic differences in human population groups, suggesting localized selection pressures, and illuminate ongoing genomic processes that function to maintain IGH locus heterogeneity.