Maria Elena Bottazzi | |
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 Bottazzi in 2020 |
Maria Elena Bottazzi is an American [1] microbiologist. As of 2024 [update] she is associate dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, as well as Distinguished Professor of Biology at Baylor University, Waco, Texas. She is editor-in-chief of Springer's Current Tropical Medicine Reports . She and Peter Hotez led the team that designed COVID-19 vaccine Corbevax.
The daughter of a Honduran diplomat, Bottazzi was born in Italy; she moved to Honduras when she was eight. [2] [3] [4] She studied microbiology and clinical chemistry as an undergraduate at the National Autonomous University of Honduras (1989), then earned a doctorate in molecular immunology and experimental pathology from the University of Florida in 1995. [5] She completed post-doctoral work in cellular biology at the University of Miami (1998) and the University of Pennsylvania (2001). [5]
Bottazzi is Associate Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, and Distinguished Professor of Biology at Baylor University, Waco, Texas. [5]
Along with Peter Hotez, Bottazzi runs the Texas Children's Hospital Center for Vaccine Development. [6] The center develops vaccines for neglected tropical diseases and other emerging and infectious diseases. One of these vaccines was a SARS-CoV vaccine that was ready for human trials in 2016, but at the time the team could find no one interested in funding it. [7] With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Bottazzi and Hotez secured funding to develop Corbevax, a COVID-19 vaccine their group offered without taking a licensing fee for the intellectual property, in hopes of lowering costs of vaccination. [8] It also employs recombinant protein technology, used in vaccines since the 1980s (like the Hepatitis B vaccine), [9] with hopes this would be easier for manufacturers to produce than the newer mRNA technology. [8] In December 2021, Corbevax received emergency use authorization from India, which preordered 300 million doses. [8]
She is editor in chief of Springer's Current Tropical Medicine Reports . [2]
In 2017 Bottazzi received the Orden Gran Cruz Placa de Oro. [10]
In 2022, she was honored with the Carnegie Corporation of New York's Great Immigrant Award. [11] [12] She was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2024. [13]
The Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) is a private medical school in Houston, Texas, United States. Originally as the Baylor University College of Medicine from 1903 to 1969, the college became independent with the current name and has been separate from Baylor University since 1969. The college consists of four schools: the School of Medicine, the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, the School of Health Professions, and the National School of Tropical Medicine.
Peter Jay Hotez is an American scientist, pediatrician, and advocate in the fields of global health, vaccinology, and neglected tropical disease control. He serves as founding dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine, Professor of Pediatrics and Molecular Virology & Microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine, where he is also Director of the Texas Children's Hospital Center for Vaccine Development and Endowed Chair in Tropical Pediatrics. He also serves as a University Professor of Biology at Baylor University.
Hookworm vaccine is a vaccine against hookworm. No effective vaccine for the disease in humans has yet been developed. Hookworms, parasitic nematodes transmitted in soil, infect approximately 700 million humans, particularly in tropical regions of the world where endemic hookworms include Ancylostoma duodenale and Necator americanus. Hookworms feed on blood and those infected with hookworms may develop chronic anaemia and malnutrition. Helminth infection can be effectively treated with benzimidazole drugs, and efforts led by the World Health Organization have focused on one to three yearly de-worming doses in schools because hookworm infections with the heaviest intensities are most common in school-age children. However, these drugs only eliminate existing adult parasites and re-infection can occur soon after treatment. School-based de-worming efforts do not treat adults or pre-school children and concerns exist about drug resistance developing in hookworms against the commonly used treatments, thus a vaccine against hookworm disease is sought to provide more permanent resistance to infection.
An inactivated vaccine is a type of vaccine that contains pathogens that have been killed or rendered inactive, so they cannot replicate or cause disease. In contrast, live vaccines use pathogens that are still alive. Pathogens for inactivated vaccines are grown under controlled conditions and are killed as a means to reduce infectivity and thus prevent infection from the vaccine.
Biological E Limited is an Indian biotechnology and biopharmaceutical company based in Hyderabad, Telangana. It specialises in the areas of low-cost vaccine production.
Brett P. Giroir is an American pediatrician. He was formerly the U.S. assistant secretary for health, a four-star admiral in the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps and an acting Food and Drug Administration commissioner.
Barry R. Bloom is Joan L. and Julius H. Jacobson Professor of Public Health, Emeritus in the Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases and Department of Global Health and Population in the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where he served as dean of the faculty from 1998 through December 31, 2008.
Carlos del Rio is a distinguished professor of medicine at Emory University School of Medicine. He is also a professor of global health and epidemiology at the Rollins School of Public Health of Emory University, executive associate dean for Faculty and Clinical Affairs at Emory University School of Medicine and co-director of the Emory Center for AIDS Research. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and was elected as its foreign secretary in 2020. In 2022, del Rio became president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2022.
Gagandeep Kang FRS is an Indian microbiologist and virologist who has been leading the work on enteric diseases, diarrheal infections and disease surveillance at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation since 2023.
Sabin Vaccine Institute, located in Washington, D.C., is a nonprofit organization promoting global vaccine development, availability, and use. Through its work, Sabin hopes to reduce human suffering by preventing the spread of vaccine-preventable, communicable disease in humans through herd immunity and mitigating the poverty caused by these diseases.
Oluwatoyin (Toyin) Asojo currently Associate Director for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging at Dartmouth Cancer Center was formerly Associate Professor and chair of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Hampton University. She was formerly an Associate Professor of Pediatrics-Tropical medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine. She works at "the interface of math, chemistry, biology, computation." She is a crystallographer and interested in structural studies of proteins from neglected tropical disease pathogens.
Caitlin M. Rivers is an American epidemiologist who as Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, specializing on improving epidemic preparedness. Rivers is currently working on the American response to the COVID-19 pandemic with a focus on the incorporation of infectious disease modeling and forecasting into public health decision making.
Jason S. McLellan is a structural biologist, professor in the Department of Molecular Biosciences and Robert A. Welch Chair in Chemistry at The University of Texas at Austin who specializes in understanding the structure and function of viral proteins, including those of coronaviruses. His research focuses on applying structural information to the rational design of vaccines and other therapies for viruses, including SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19, and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). McLellan and his team collaborated with researchers at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ Vaccine Research Center to design a stabilized version of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, which biotechnology company Moderna used as the basis for the vaccine mRNA-1273, the first COVID-19 vaccine candidate to enter phase I clinical trials in the U.S. At least three other vaccines use this modified spike protein: those from Pfizer and BioNTech; Johnson & Johnson and Janssen Pharmaceuticals; and Novavax.
Valneva COVID-19 vaccine is a COVID-19 vaccine developed by French biotechnology company Valneva SE in collaboration with the American biopharmaceutical company Dynavax Technologies.
SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, was isolated in late 2019. Its genetic sequence was published on 11 January 2020, triggering an urgent international response to prepare for an outbreak and hasten the development of a preventive COVID-19 vaccine. Since 2020, vaccine development has been expedited via unprecedented collaboration in the multinational pharmaceutical industry and between governments. By June 2020, tens of billions of dollars were invested by corporations, governments, international health organizations, and university research groups to develop dozens of vaccine candidates and prepare for global vaccination programs to immunize against COVID‑19 infection. According to the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), the geographic distribution of COVID‑19 vaccine development shows North American entities to have about 40% of the activity, compared to 30% in Asia and Australia, 26% in Europe, and a few projects in South America and Africa.
Vaccine-associated enhanced respiratory disease (VAERD), or simply enhanced respiratory disease (ERD), is an adverse event where an exacerbated course of respiratory disease occurs with higher incidence in the vaccinated population than in the control group. It is a barrier against vaccine development that can lead to its failure.
SCB-2019 is a protein subunit COVID-19 vaccine developed by Clover Biopharmaceuticals using an adjuvant from Dynavax technologies. Positive results of Phase I trials for the vaccine were published in The Lancet and the vaccine completed enrollment of 29,000 participants in Phase II/III trials in July 2021. In September 2021, SCB-2019 announced Phase III results showing 67% efficacy against all cases of COVID-19 and 79% efficacy against all cases of the Delta variant. Additionally, the vaccine was 84% effective against moderate cases and 100% effective against hospitalization.
Corbevax is a protein subunit COVID-19 vaccine developed by Texas Children's Hospital Center for Vaccine Development and Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas and Dynavax technologies based in Emeryville, California. It is licensed to Indian biopharmaceutical firm Biological E. Limited (BioE) for development and production.
Lyda Elena Osorio Amaya is a Colombian physician, epidemiologist and infectious disease specialist. She is an associate professor at the Universidad del Valle, and a researcher at the Centro Internacional de Entrenamiento e Investigaciones Médicas (CIDEIM) in Cali, Valle del Cauca. Osorio's research has focused mainly on vector-borne diseases like malaria, leishmaniasis, Zika and dengue fever. She has also played a role in Colombia's response against COVID-19.
IndoVac is a recombinant protein subunit COVID-19 vaccine, developed by Indonesian pharmaceutical company Bio Farma and Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. It is the world's first officially halal certified COVID-19 vaccine, but the most popular existing vaccines had already been widely endorsed as Halal by various Islamic groups. The vaccine was officially launched by President Joko Widodo on 13 October 2022.
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