Grant Supports Scientist’s Research Aimed at Developing A Better HIV Vaccine

Rong Fan arrived at Yale a mere five months ago, but his plans to revolutionize diagnostic testing are already gaining attention. The assistant professor of biomedical engineering has been awarded a Grand Challenges Explorations grant to improve the way we monitor our body’s immune response and evaluate potential HIV vaccines.

“This is a tremendous accomplishment for anyone, but particularly for an assistant professor in his first semester,” says Mark Saltzman, chair of biomedical engineering at the School of Engineering & Applied Science.

Grand Challenges Explorations is part of the Gates Foundation’s Grand Challenges in Global Health initiative, a five-year, $100 million program to achieve major breakthroughs in global health. The initiative grants target smaller, early-stage projects in categories that range from contraception and infectious disease to creating low-cost diagnostics for global health conditions.

Fan, who came to Yale in January from the California Institute of Technology, where he was a postdoctoral scholar, plans to use the grant to develop a microchip capable of testing the function of T cells to evaluate potential HIV ­vaccines.

The body’s T cells — specialized white blood cells that are part of our immune systems — can have multiple functions, Fan explains. Researchers developing new vaccines test the body’s T cell response to various antigens to determine how effective the vaccine might be in fighting an infectious disease, such as HIV. The greater the response (measured in the secretion of a selected protein), the greater the potential of the vaccine. What researchers have found, however, is that sometimes a vaccine will induce an immune response in tests, but will fail completely in patients. This was the case in Merck’s recent HIV T cell vaccines, which elicited a strong immune response and made it all the way to phase III in clinical trials, but proved ineffective in protecting patients.

Fan’s microchip will help identify T cells with a large number of functions, increasing the chances that they will be useful in fighting disease, as well as test the most potent combination of different T cells. Some advanced tests being developed in research laboratories can only measure up to five functions of an individual T cell and are extremely expensive. Fan believes his microchip could test up to 20 functions simultaneously, and at a tiny fraction of the price. While this project will focus specifically on HIV, the chip could be applied to a host of infectious diseases, he says.

The initial grant is for $100,000, with potential funding of $1 million if the preliminary results look promising. “It was my first proposal since coming to Yale, so I was really excited to get it.”

Previous Grand Challenges Explorations Grant recipients from Yale in­clude David Spiegel, assistant professor of chemistry; Craig Crews, professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology, professor of chemistry and professor of pharmacology; Karen Anderson, professor of pharmacology; Jorge Galan, the Lucille P. Markey Professor of Microbial Pathogenesis and Cell Biology and chair of microbial pathogenesis; and Barbara Kazmierczak, associate professor of internal medicine and microbial pathogenesis.