On Aug. 20, 2020, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), one of the National Institutes of Health, awarded more than $6.4 million to Erica Ollmann Saphire, Ph.D., professor at La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI), to support research toward COVID-19 antibody therapeutics.

The Coronavirus Immunotherapeutic Consortium (CoVIC) was partnered with NIAID to provide independent evaluation of antibody therapeutics as part of the federal government’s Operation Warp Speed. The funding to LJI fueled ongoing efforts by CoVIC, led by Saphire, to analyze virus-fighting antibodies and track how the novel coronavirus may attempt to escape those antibodies.

CoVIC was established in March 2020 through funding from the COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator, a partnership between the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome and the Mastercard Impact Fund. Through CoVIC, Saphire’s lab is fielding promising therapeutic antibody candidates against COVID-19—contributed by dozens of laboratories around the world—for side-by-side, apples-to-apples comparisons of antibody function. As part of CoVIC analyses, her team uses LJI’s powerful pair of Titan electron microscopes for high-resolution analysis of how the antibodies interact with proteins of SARS-CoV-2.