EPPIcenter Seminar: Leah Katzelnick- Immune Interactions: Dengue, Zika and other coronaviruses
Mosquito-borne flaviviruses infect hundreds of millions of people globally each year and cause a spectrum of life-threatening diseases, including hemorrhagic fevers, encephalitis, and severe congenital abnormalities. There are still no licensed, broadly protective vaccines against two of the most important flaviviruses: dengue virus and Zika virus. Dengue viruses 1-4 are challenging vaccine targets because sub-protective vaccines can increase risk of Dengue Hemorrhagic Fever/Dengue Shock Syndrome, the disease dengue vaccines are designed to prevent. The only licensed dengue vaccine to date significantly increases risk of severe dengue disease in those without a prior dengue virus exposure. Zika viruses emerged across the Americas in 2014-2017, causing major pandemics and congenital Zika syndrome, making development of a Zika vaccine a high priority.
Leah C. Katzelnick, PhD, MPH is a Stadtman Investigator, an NIH Distinguished Scholar in the Laboratory of Infectious Diseases, and Chief of the Viral Epidemiology and Immunity Unit of the NIAID. Her work focuses on immunologically complex diseases caused by flaviviruses, including dengue and Zika viruses, as well as coronaviruses. They collaborate with research teams to study determinants of disease in longitudinal cohort and vaccine studies in Nicaragua, Thailand, Ecuador, the Philippines, and other sites. To address questions about virus antigenicity, host protective immunity, and population-level viral transmission dynamics, they use biologically relevant immunological assays and diverse computational and epidemiological methods to measure and evaluate the role of immunity in protection against disease in human cohort studies.
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Dr. Katzelnick pursued a PhD studying antigenic variation among dengue viruses at the University of Cambridge and the National Institutes of Health as an NIH OxCam Scholar and Gates Cambridge Scholar. After receiving her Ph.D. in 2016, she conducted her postdoctoral work at UC Berkeley and University of Florida on determinants of dengue and Zika disease, spending a year in Ecuador and Nicaragua to work closely with research teams conducting longitudinal cohort studies.
Join the EPPIcenter in welcoming Leah C. Katzelnick as a seminar speaker.
The EPPIcenter at UCSF aims to advance the understanding of infectious diseases to reduce global morbidity and mortality. We believe that the greatest success in the fight against infectious diseases will come through a highly interdisciplinary, systems epidemiology approach, connecting traditionally siloed theoretical work, technology development, generation and collection of empiric data, and analysis using statistical and mathematical modeling.