I was invited to speak at the Antibody Engineering and Therapeutics Conference (presenting mine and Matt’s recently published epitope profiling paper), in San Diego (December 12th – 16th). Unfortunately, the pandemic had other ideas so I decided not to travel but luckily the conference was hybrid. 

The conference included 1 day of pre-conference workshops and 4 days of presentations from academic and industry, with livestreaming of the initial keynotes (including one from Charlotte). Remaining talks were recorded and made available after the conference. I’ve highlighted a few of my favourite talks and conference themes, with links to papers where available.

Naturally, a lot of the presented research related to covid-19. I was speaking in the ‘Antibody Repertoires and Covid-19’ session, where there were interesting presentations from Professor Eline Luning Prak from the University of Pennsylvania and Elaine Chen from Vanderbilt University analysing antibody responses in covid-recovered individuals, and comparing vaccine responses in covid-recovered vs covid-naiive individuals. Other talks around SARS-CoV-2 vaccines included Dr Laura Walker from Adimab/Adagio Therapeutics comparing BCR repertoire responses to different types of vaccinations, and the effect of using different booster types.

Continue reading →