Infectious Diseases

Infectious diseases like tuberculosis and malaria pose an ever-increasing risk to communities around the world. Meanwhile, a lack of investment, long treatment protocols and drug resistance have stymied innovation in this area. In this Front Row lecture, Vice President of Medicinal Chemistry Arnab Chatterjee discussed how the Calibr-Skaggs Institute of Innovative Medicines—the drug discovery and development arm of Scripps Research—is using innovative new approaches and technologies to overcome these historic barriers. His work at the Calibr-Skaggs Institute is helping accelerate the delivery of safe, effective and accessible medicines to countries spanning the globe.

Scientists at Scripps Research are working to develop universal vaccines capable of neutralizing many variants of a given virus. In recent years, they have made significant progress toward creating universal vaccines for influenza, HIV and coronavirus. In the third installment of our universal vaccine series, we hear from top scientists in the field about the latest developments in the effort to create universal vaccines for HIV, and the impact these elusive immunizations could have on the world. Professor William Schief and his team are focused on developing an effective HIV vaccine using a novel strategy: eliciting broadly neutralizing antibodies (bnAbs). bnAbs are a rare type of antibody that can fight and protect against many different variants of a virus. Researchers have long struggled to identify and induce the appropriate bnAbs for HIV vaccination, but Schief’s lab—in collaboration with many others at Scripps Research—is applying a variety of computation-guided and structure-based design techniques to overcome these historic hurdles.