Our third installment on prefusion stabilization of herpesvirus gB proteins is available as a preprint: doi.org/10.64898/202.... A great collaboration with colleagues at Merck. Our prefusion HSV-2 gB protein adopts a more closed conformation than has been observed for HSV-1 gB in recent papers.

New Year's Eve Red Wings game with the family!

Excited for Adam Klivans and my other colleagues at UT working in the AI space!

Happy Halloween! My daughter is dressed as Hornet from Silksong, the game I've spent 60 hours playing the past two months

I'm honored to receive a MacArthur Fellowship. As always, I extend my sincerest thanks to all my wonderful mentors, colleagues, collaborators, admins, and trainees who make this work possible. #MacFellow

Our preprint, in collaboration with Rino Rappuoli & Emanuele Andreano, is out! Co-led by colleagues at TLS, my grad student Ling Zhou @lingzhou.bsky.social, and postdoc Emily Rundlet @cryoemily.bsky.social, we identified OPG153 as a poxvirus bnAb target via B cell isolation & AlphaFold3 prediction.

Our latest preprint is now available doi.org/10.1101/2025...! Led by my postdoc, Luqiang Guo @luqiang.bsky.social, we determined a ~2.4 A resolution structure of the hantavirus glycoprotein tetramer on the surface of VLPs. Also determined structures of dimers of tetramers and Fab-bound tetramers.

Check out our latest study, led by grad student Ryan McCool @rmccool.bsky.social‬, in collaboration with Vaccine Company. We were able to stabilize EBV gB in the prefusion conformation, determine its cryo-EM structure to 3.1 A, and assess its immunogenicity in mice. www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

Getting ready for the Viruses and Cells GRC in Castelldefels

New exhibit at the National Inventors Hall of Fame 👀

Very cool! www.nature.com/articles/d41...

"Angry, disappointed, frustrated"--Scientists were making progress on vaccines and antivirals for the next pandemic--until this week, when the Trump administration abruptly told them to stop. Here's my story with @apoorvanyt.bsky.social Gift link: nyti.ms/43Xz77q

We just had our first grant terminated. This was a U19 AViDD grant (grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...). It was set to end next month, although many in the consortia were hoping for NCEs.

Wow! UT Austin’s Jason McLellan will be inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for his work on structure-based vaccine design that led to development of vaccines to fight COVID-19 & RSV. @mclellanlab.bsky.social @utaustin.bsky.social #COVIDVaccine cns.utexas.edu/news/announc...

PhDs in biochemistry, structural biology, pharmacology, or similar, located in the US and with strong publication track records and a high motivation to solve Parkinson's, please send CV directly to me at [email protected]. Repost appreciated.

Taking the family to their first Red Wings game!

Congratulations Elizabeth! Great collaborative effort with our colleagues Kartik Chandran, Andrew Herbert, Stephanie Monticelli and more!

Register now to hear some cool vaccine science! I'll be speaking at this conference, so come hang out!

Time for a name change?

Let's go Lions!

My graduate student Nasim Abdi just won 2nd place for her poster at the International Conference for Pandemic Preparedness in Trieste, Italy! www.pathogen-ri.eu/conference/. Great collaboration with @drjimmydale.bsky.social at Houston Methodist🤝

Austin now has some Michelin-rated restaurants! guide.michelin.com/us/en/articl...

ACL Music Festival! Teddy Swims on stage.

Check out our pre-print describing a CCHFV glycoprotein complex in the pre-fusion conformation! We used several engineering tricks to design our final construct, GP38-GnH-DS-Gc. Great collaborative effort, led by graduate student @Eliza4Science!...

View from Austin, TX

Saw Road House with the cast at SXSW!

Promising results for a third PreF-based RSV vaccine: https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMoa2307079

My babies are the October Molecule of the Month pdb101.rcsb.org/motm/286

My babies are the October Molecule of the Month https://pdb101.rcsb.org/motm/286

Flight to BOS to attend FASEB conference canceled by @united. Going to miss your keynote @HarmitMalik ☹️

Had a blast at the @blink182 concert last night at @MoodyCenterATX!

Positive Phase I results for @icosavax's bivalent RSV/HMPV vaccine candidate displaying prefusion F-based antigens on their protein nanoparticles https://ir.icosavax.com/news-releases/news-release-details/icosavax-announces-positive-topline-interim-phase-1-results

Arrived in Montreux, ready for @nidovirus2023!

It's an incredible day for structure-based vaccine design, and I'm thrilled to see our prefusion RSV F antigen get approved as the first RSV vaccine. Still more work to do to reduce the RSV disease burden, but this will help! Congrats @BarneyGrahamMD!...

Well, this is new (to me). Seems like a low bar for authorship...

Great to see some old friends from the Vaccine Research Center days

Pretty cool that our coronavirus spike stabilization (2P) patent was one of the winners of the USPTO Patents for Humanity award in the COVID-19 category: https://www.uspto.gov/blog/director/entry/recognizing-life-saving-covid-19 @BarneyGrahamMD @WardLab1 @goodwish916

RSV wave hammers hospitals — but vaccines and treatments are coming https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04434-5

Checked in and ready for the start of #AVS11 @AusVirologySoc! Amazing view from the room😍

More great news for RSV vaccines (and structure-based vaccine design), this time for maternal immunization! https://apnews.com/article/science-health-business-covid-ec1dae2bd47d604712fc2a4a842591a8

Happy Halloween from the McLellan Lab:)

Great article in the @washingtonpost by @Carolynyjohnson on the development of structure-based RSV vaccines! It's an exciting time in the field given the recent positive phase III results from @GSK and @pfizer. https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/10/10/rsv-vaccine/

Being an associate editor is really frustrating. It takes forever to find even 2 reviewers. I'm well over 10 invites for some manuscripts. Maybe corresponding authors should be required to review at least two manuscripts for each manuscript they submit to that journal?

Check out our manuscript reporting the structure of the αMβ2 integrin bound to the adenylate cyclase toxin from B. pertussis! https://www.cell.com/cell-reports/fulltext/S2211-1247(22)01013-0 Lots of cool new biological insights. Great work from grad student @JoryGoldsmith in...

Great day on Lake Travis with the lab

A great night with @erwright73 and colleagues at @RARE_Madison. Got to meet J. Henry and try some @JHenryBourbon before finishing off that tomahawk steak dry-aged for 2 months!

Thanks @erwright73 for showing me around the National CryoET Center. Incredible setup, every toy imaginable! Plus, I got to try some George T Stagg HAZMAT Edition! 😍

Please send ice cream

At USA v Grenada with @maynard_lab!