Juthathip Mongkolsapaya

Our main research is to understand immune-responses, particularly antibody responses, against emerging pathogens, such as dengue virus, zika virus, HIV, Ebola virus, SARS and MERS and, the most recent, SARS-CoV2. We employ a wide range of approaches including virology, immunology, biochemistry, and structural biology to elucidate pathogenic mechanisms, to generate diagnostic and therapeutic reagents, design vaccines, and contributed to policy development. For example, during the COVID pandemic, we generated reagents that were involved in establishing a protocol to measure the antibody response, which have been used to monitoring the immune status in UK population. Hundreds of monoclonal antibodies were generated and characterised for their neutralisation activities, cross-reaction among the variants, and bio-physical properties. And in combination with crystal and cryo-EM structures, we described the antigenic distance among the variants and how new emerging variants escaped from existing immunity.