David Ho - April 1, 2020

David Ho: Characterizing and isolating antibodies from convalescent patients

Dr. Ho is using three parallel strategies to find a neutralizing antibody for a therapeutic treatment. The first approach is to isolate neutralizing antibodies from B cells using a yeast library for screening (with Brandon Dekosky). The second strategy is to sort plasmablasts based on cell surface markers to look for the correct antibody. This is in collaboration with Victor Guo, Chuck Drake and Peter Sims. His final strategy is to take patient serum with high neutralizing titers absorbed with SARS-CoV-2 spike trimer protein in order to elute the bound antibody. This bound antibody can then be identified via mass spectrometry (this is done in collaboration with Trixi Ueberheide from NYU). His team is also amassing a cohort of convalescent cases (most from New Rochelle) and they will systematically study and characterize the virology as well as look for the ability of the serum to neutralize a pseudotyped virus that carries the SARS-CoV-2 protein.