LCID Summer 2023 Newsletter

Dr. Peter Hotez, center, with Gregg La Montagne (brother of John LaMontagne) and his wife, Carolyn Foote

Hotez Discusses Vaccinations and the Anti-Science Movement at 2023 LaMontagne Symposium

Internationally recognized physician-scientist and science author Peter J. Hotez, M.D., Ph.D. was the speaker for the 2023 LaMontagne Symposium that was held March 21, 2023 on the UT Campus. The title of his lecture was Global Vaccinations and "The Anti-Poverty Vaccines": Science vs. Anti-Science.

Hotez, who is Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine and the Co-director of the Texas Children’s Center for Vaccine Development, spoke about how vaccines help reduce poverty and improve health outcomes. He then addressed how anti-science and anti-vaccine movements have become political. This has impacted the rate of disease and death, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic with the resistance to COVID vaccines in politically conservative areas. He urged scientists to find effective ways to address this resistance, rather than ignore the politics involved in the anti-vaccine and anti-science movements.

To view the recording of the Symposium Lecture, please click here.

Inaugural LCID Blog Post Features Dr. Poulami Das and Her Research on Viral Retrotranslocation 

LCID announces its new blog feature of the website. Here we will feature posts for both scientists and non-scientists regarding infectious disease research at the LaMontagne Center for Infectious Disease. Some posts will look at infectious disease research papers, while others will feature Q&As with different LCID PIs and researchers.

In our inaugural blog post, we spoke to Dr. Poulami Das, researcher in the Dudley Lab on her work which is focused on understanding ways that viruses disrupt cellular function. 

FDA Approves RSV Vaccine Developed with McLellan, NIH Research

The Food and Drug Administration recently approved the first-ever respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccine for older adults that utilizes research developed by a team that includes LCID Member Jason McLellan and scientists at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). This vaccine culminates a decades-long search for an effective tool to prevent this illness which can be deadly to children and older adults.

McLellan, along with NIH researchers Barney Graham and Peter Kwong, has been working for several years on structure-based vaccine design to create an effective RSV vaccine. Incorporating this research, GSK developed a vaccine, Arexvy, that was approved by the FDA on May 3 for use in older adults. Another RSV vaccine for pregnant mothers developed by Pfizer to help protect infants has received a recommendation for approval by a panel of FDA advisers. This vaccine uses the same research from McLellan and the NIH team.  

For more information, please see: FDA-Approved RSV Vaccine Enabled by Work of UT Molecular Biologist