Seeing the antiviral T cell immunity: believing the epitope based vaccines

The emerging and re-emerging viruses e.g. SARS-CoV-2 and influenza viruses pose a great threaten to public health. Considering the special features such as the conserved targets and long-term durability, the host T-cell provides an unneglectable role during the anti-virus immunity. We established a T cell-based test, surveillance and research platform to investigate the mechanism by which the human T cell immunity reacts to the viruses. We have screened a series of T cell epitopes from SARS-CoV, SARS-CoV-2, MERS-CoV, influenza viruses, ZIKV, HBV, EV71, SFTSV, etc. and utilized these epitopes to investigate the antigen-specific cellular immune responses in the patients, convalescents, and vaccinated populations. In addition, we investigated the T cell immune features of different vertebrate animals by determined the 3D structures of a diverse MHC molecules, i.e. HLA (human), H-2 (mouse), Mamu (monkey), SLA (swine), BF2 (chicken), BoLA (bovine), DLA (dog), ELA (horse), RLA (rabbit), FLA (feline) and Ptal (bat), etc. The understanding of T cell mediated immune mechanism to the emerging virus infections will benefit the development of the peptide-based vaccines.

Prof. William Liu is the Deputy Director of the Chinese National Influenza Center. He graduated from the School of Public Health, Peking University Health Science Center in 2005. He received his Ph.D degree from Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences and received his postdoctoral training at Yale School of Medicine. The main research focus of his group is the T-cell recognition of emerging and re-emerging viruses, i.e. SARS-CoV-2, influenza viruses etc. He has published more than 120 papers in leading journals such as Nature, Immunity, PNAS and J Immunology and J Virology. He is the deputy Editor-in-Chief of Biosafety and Health, Invited Guest Editor of Frontiers in Immunology and Science China Life Sciences, and editors for Infectious Diseases & Immunity. Dr. Liu has worked as Chinese Public Health Team leader in Africa during the Ebola Epidemic. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he worked in Wuhan for over 100 days.