Our guest is Dr. James E. Crowe, Director of the Vanderbilt Vaccine Center and the Ann Scott Carell Professor of Pediatrics, Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology. Dr. Crowe and his project team were responsible for delivering a game-changing medical solution in the battle against the COVID-19 pandemic – the development of antibodies that combat the virus.
Dr. Crowe explains another ambitious project, called The Human Immunome Program, which is aimed at collecting the billions of genetic sequences of antibodies in the human immune system. In 2019 the Crowe Lab completed a simulated pandemic outbreak and developed a record-breaking rapid antibody discovery platform. In early 2020, they were preparing for another simulation when COVID-19 emerged. Hear the fascinating story of how his team pivoted and launched a project with no reagents, no information, and no samples.
Other topics we address this episode are vaccine hesitancy, herd immunity, decision analysis, compliance, and information sharing. James has a number of project managers on his staff, and we hear about the implementation of formal project management procedures in the lab including after action reviews and project management processes and tools.
Dr. Crowe is a board certified pediatric infectious diseases physician and viral immunology researcher. He received five years of postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Dr. Robert Chanock at the NIH, and then completed ID fellowship training in 1996 at Vanderbilt, where he has run an independent laboratory since. His research has been supported by a large number of investigator-initiated research awards from NIH, DARPA, DTRA, and foundations with support of ~ $150M. Dr. Crowe and his team have pioneered development of human monoclonal antibodies as potential treatments for viral diseases.
The Crowe Lab studies the human immune response to infection for a wide variety of major human pathogens, including many emerging infections. In 2019, Dr. Crowe was awarded the Merck Future Insight Prize (a one million euro prize for pandemic preparedness), and was named one of 10 Medifind 2020 Science Superheroes Fighting COVID-19. He was the recipient of a 2020 AAAS Golden Goose Award for his work on COVID-19. A number of vaccine candidates and human monoclonal antibodies developed in the course of his research have been tested in humans, including antibodies for SARS-CoV-2 now in Phase III clinical trials with AstraZeneca.
