Andy Pekosz

PhD Candidate & @andrewpekosz.bsky.social Lab member Camille Wouters defends her PhD thesis tomorrow.

Good Luck, Camille!

📆 Friday, Sept. 26, 2025
⏰ 10:00 - 11:00 a.m.
📍 @johnshopkinssph.bsky.social
🏢 W2030

JHU Center of Excellence leads global fight against influenza Experts at Johns Hopkins and across the country work together to better understand the behavior and characteristics of respiratory viruses, how our immune system responds to them, and how we can preve...

A profile in @jhu.edu's HUB highlights JH-CEIRR's @ceirrnetwork.bsky.social important influenza research,
led by co-directors @johnshopkinssph.bsky.social virologist & professor @andrewpekosz.bsky.social & @hopkinsmedicine.bsky.social Richard Rothman, MD

More here:
hub.jhu.edu/2025/09/10/j...

Virologist, @johnshopkinssph.bsky.social Professor & @johnshopkinsmmi.bsky.social vice-chair @andrewpekosz.bsky.social explains mRNA vaccine technology on @npr.org @wfae.bsky.social Charlotte Talks

Listen here for answers & clarity around COVID-19 vaccines
www.wfae.org/show/charlot...

Found this book in my department mailbox yesterday. No envelope, no shipping information, no note and I was the only person to receive this "gift". Clearly, someone needs to come to my lecture on the origin and evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic to get educated on the facts.

Shop is restocked with itty-bitty paintings #sciart ko-fi.com/1626SLXL3044F neuro, micro, genetics, algorithms

RFK Jr Pulls Millions Of Dollars Of mRNA Vaccine Funding, Citing Misinformation – Here's What To Know The Health and Human Services Secretary claimed, against all scientific consensus, that these vaccines are ineffective.

“It’s not so much that the virus has become less dangerous, it’s that we have immunity, so we fight off the virus more efficiently than we did early in the pandemic,” said @johnshopkinssph.bsky.social @jhu.edu Professor and Virologist @andrewpekosz.bsky.social

www.iflscience.com/rfk-jr-pulls...

Requiring grant review by political appointees will continue to delay and disrupt critical research and interferes with scientists’ ability to help protect the nation’s health and security. Read our statement: asm.org/press-releas...

Congratulations to Jerome Edwards on defending his PhD thesis on mechanisms driving the attenuation of Live attenuated measles vaccine virus replication. Jerome did great things and is yet another example of Diane Griffin's mentoring. @johnshopkinsmmi.bsky.social @johnshopkinssph.bsky.social

An image showing the ARTIC and Pathoplexus logos connected by blue lines, with the text "Hiring: post-doc/software engineer" and "Global open-source pathogen tools" and "Join Swiss TPH, Work on ARTIC2 and Pathoplexus, Basel, Switzerland"

📢New job posting!📢
Are you excited by the idea of building global infrastructure to make pathogen sequencing more accessible, interpretable, and equitable? 🧑🏻‍💻🧬

My group at @swisstph.ch has an opening working with ARTIC2, @pathoplexus.org, & Loculus - read on!

1/5

gray and black brain painting with curving lines and text - there is no such thing as artificial intelligence

There it is
artologica.etsy.com/listing/4338...

Lives and life-Years Saved From COVID-19 Vaccination This comparative effectiveness study analyses the number of lives and life-years saved worldwide among those who had been vaccinated during the COVID-19 pandemic 2020-2024 years.

Covid vaccination saved ~2.5 million lives between 2020-2024
jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

Our two summer students wrapped up their stays in the laboratory with posters on the influenza viruses that circulated this past year. One preprint is up and another is coming. lots of thanks to @ceirrnetwork.bsky.social and @johnshopkinsmmi.bsky.social for support and collaborations!

Dept of Molecular Microbiology & Immunology at Johns Hopkins (@johnshopkinsmmi.bsky.social) Basic science dept focused on control, prevention & treatment of infectious diseases caused by viruses, bacteria, parasites and fungi. MMI is part of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Heal...

Read the paper for more data and some speculations as to why we are seeing such changes in age susceptibility and antigenic drift with C.3re. Lots of support for this study from @ceirrnetwork.bsky.social @johnshopkinsmmi.bsky.social @johnshopkinssph.bsky.social

Second, C.3re escaped influenza vaccine induced serum neutralizing antibody in a very significant way.

Why is this important? First, the C.3re infections skewed to a much younger age group than the C.5 infections that had been occurring earlier in the influenza season.

Finally, we named it C.3re because it’s a reassortant virus between a C.5.1 and a C.3 clade virus, with a little uncertainty about where the NS segment came from

It also encodes an NA with some mutations at known antibody epitopes and near the enzyme active site

The first interesting thing about this IBV variant, C.3re, is that it has a mutation that reintroduces a N-linked glycosylation site at 197 of HA – a site known to mask a neutralizing antibody epitope

...when we saw a surge of IBV cases in the Baltimore/DC area, driven by clade C.3, which hadn’t dominated in some time.

Weekly US Influenza Surveillance Report: Key Updates for Week 28, ending July 12, 2025 Seasonal influenza activity is low.

The past influenza season was rather quiet when it came IBV www.cdc.gov/fluview/surv... until about March...

Emergence of an Antigenically Drifted and Reassorted Influenza B Virus at the end of the 2024-25 Influenza Season BACKGROUND Influenza B virus is a significant contributor to annual total and severe cases of influenza, particularly in the young and elderly. Coupling whole virus genome sequencing with the monitori...

A new preprint from the lab describing an influenza B virus that emerged late in the 2024-25 season that underwent both reassortment and antigenic drift with @eakin.bsky.social leading my team in this collaboration with Heba Mostafa at Johns Hopkins Medicine ‪ www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

5/5 This work was driven by PhD student Annie Werner, in collaboration with @Virusnerdette and Cossette @cosettegrace from the University of Maryland with help from Elgin Akin from my group

4/5...but it may indicate that boosting NA antibodies might be a faster way to induce human population immunity to bovine H5N1. Several other studies have indicated similar things.

3/5 The N1 NA crossreactive antibodies are boosted after seasonal influenza H1N1 infection, but not by H3N2 infection or seasonal influenza vaccination. Of course, we don’t know how these crossreactive NA antibodies modulate H5N1 disease...

2/5 While there is little H5 HA binding or neutralizing antibody responses, there is a significant amount of antibodies that recognize bovine N1 NA and that inhibit NA enzymatic activity.

Low levels of H5N1 HA and NA antibodies in the human population are boosted by seasonal A/H1N1 infection but not by A/H3N2 infection or influenza vaccination An increase in the number of human cases of influenza A/H5N1 infection in the US has raised concerns about the pandemic potential of the virus. Preexisting population immunity is a key determinant for...

1/5 The lab’s first paper on bovine H5N1 looks at preexisting antibody immunity in the human population and how influenza vaccination and infection effect it. @johnshopkinsmmi.bsky.social @johnshopkinssph.bsky.social @ceirrnetwork.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Such a great team to work with. Its so important to focus on science and logic when dealing with complex problems like avian flu in poultry.

ASM lifetime achievement award winner Susan Weiss getting interviewed by her colleague Brenda Hogue ASM Microbe2025 #ASMicrobiology

Line Up - WVON 6:00 – 9:00 AM CST WVON MORNING SHOW W/ RUFUS WILLIAMS

about to get on WVON Chicago with Cleopatra Draper to discuss recent changes at ACIP and in vaccine recommendations. www.wvon.com/line-up/

Christian Pfaller identified similar mechanisms using recombinant MeV www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1.... We’ve been talking and are coordinating manuscripts submission because that is a part of the scientific process – independent laboratories reaching similar conclusions using different approaches