Becca

COVID-19 vaccination induces cross-neutralisation of sarbecoviruses related to SARS-CoV-2 Close relatives of SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 continue to circulate in wildlife, posing an ongoing threat of zoonotic spillover. While vaccination played a key role in controlling the COVID-19 pandemic...

Excited to share our preprint on the ability of COVID-19 vaccination to cross-protect against related bat and pangolin sarbecoviruses! Thanks to the wonderful @gewest.bsky.social and @lab-rihn-th.bsky.social for a fantastic collaboration 🦇🦠https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.04.04.647203v1

Platelet partnerships and lasting memories - Nature Immunology Pulendran and colleagues define a molecular signature that can be used to predict the durability of antibody responses to vaccination and reveal important insights into the mechanisms by which vaccine...

Aren't platelets just fantastic?
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A single mutation in bovine influenza H5N1 hemagglutinin switches specificity to human receptors In 2024, several human infections with highly pathogenic clade 2.3.4.4b bovine influenza H5N1 viruses in the United States raised concerns about their capability for bovine-to-human or even human-to-h...

Excellent study by my Penn-CEIRR colleagues showing that a single HA substitution in H5 (at same exact residue that changed in the British Columbia case!) enables efficient H5N1 binding to receptors in the human upper airway.

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...