Marcela Pasetti
Principal Investigator of MADI
Marcela Pasetti, Ph.D. (Professor, University of Maryland) will oversee the research conducted under MADI. She has worked in the fields of vaccine immunology, infectious diseases, and mucosal immunity for >25 years with a strong track record of scholarly contributions. Dr. Pasetti has been PI of multiple NIH awards involving multiple institutions, including foreign sites, and has experience in leadership of scientific projects. She will direct the MADI consortium working collaboratively with MADI Projects and Core Leaders, to ensure successful completion of the work proposed. She oversees the Applied Immunology Section at the Center for Vaccine Development and Global Health at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. Her group investigates immune responses elicited by natural infection and vaccination in clinical studies and animal models. She has a long standing interest in maternal infant immunity.
Project and Core Leads
Marcela Pasetti, Ph.D. Project 1 and Administrative Core Lead
Professor, University of Maryland
Ryan McNamara, Ph.D. Core 1 Lead
Senior Staff Scientist, Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard
Anne Hoen, Ph.D. Core 2 Lead
Associate Professor, Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College
MADI Participants
Jean Michel Chanchu
Jean Michel Chanchu received his BSc in 2014 at George Mason University. He has an extensive background in molecular biology with most of his career being heavily centered in utilizing molecular biology techniques to answer research questions. His research experience includes confocal imaging of transgenic zebrafish brains and flow cytometry. He joined Dr. Pasetti’s group in 2022, and is currently focused on two separate projects in MADI. First is developing a new Pertussis Toxin Neutralization Assay using a state of the art live-cell imaging system called MICA (by Leica) and analyzed on AI assisted software called AIVIA. The second is optimizing a full-spectrum flow cytometry panel for T-cells and B-cells under the guidance of Dr. Cristiana Cairo.
Nicholas Curtis
Nicholas Curtis, a PhD candidate in Jiwon Lee's laboratory, works with MADI Project 2. He has a background in serum antibody proteomics, mass spectrometry, and single B cell analysis. As a member of MADI, he is involved in proteomic identification and tracking of IgG and IgA in biological fluids as well as developing methods to analyze IgG subclass glycosylation and abundance among antigen reactive and non-reactive antibodies.
Loïc De Doncker
Loïc De Doncker is a medical doctor currently completing his residency in pediatrics in Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). He has started his Ph.D. at the laboratory of Arnaud Marchant (Institute for Medical Immunology, ULB) in October 2021 to work on the determinants of infant immune responses to pertussis vaccination. The project aims to define the role of transferred maternal antibodies and their interactions with infant immune cells on the magnitude and quality of antibody responses to vaccination. His project is based on a system serology approach, using Luminex technology and flow cytometry. Beside his research activities, Loïc De Doncker his involved in the organization, the recruitment and the sample processing of several cohorts, including the core cohorts MADI-01 and MADI-02.
Neda Dezfuli
Neda Dezfuli is a Postdoctoral fellow at University of Maryland, Baltimore. She previously worked as a researcher at the Iranian Blood Transfusion Organization (IBTO), Immunology lab, Tehran, Iran. She also worked as a researcher at subspecialty Immunology Lab at National Research Institute tuberculosis and Lungs disease (NRITLD), Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran. She was a lecturer in immunology at Dezful University of Medical Sciences, Dezful , Iran. Her technical skills include: flow cytometry (cells surfaces markers, intracellular cytokines), ELISA, DNA extraction and PCR, RNA extraction and real-time PCR, immunofluorescence, gene analysis by RFLP and SNP specially for polymorphisms, cell culture, SDS-PAGE and Western blot, and statistical analysis.
In the MADI project, she runs pertussis toxin neutralization assays where Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells are exposed to pertussis toxin and undergo cell intoxication that is quantified using confocal microscopy. These effects are prevented by pertussis toxin-specific antibodies. She also studies the antigen-specific antibodies where antibody-dependent neutrophil (ADNP) and monocyte (ADMP) phagocytic activity are analyzed by flow cytometric analysis and quantification of phagocytosis.
Audrey Fraikin
Audrey Fraikin has a Master’s degree in Biomedical Sciences from the Université de Namur (Belgium). She started her PhD in December 2021 in the research group of Pr. Véronique Flamand and Pr. Arnaud Marchant in the Institute for Medical Immunology (IMI). Her role in the P3 of MADI is (1) to study the features of maternal antibodies that promote immunity to type A influenza virus in the neonatal preclinical model and (2) to assess the impact of maternal antibodies and of their biophysical characteristics on vaccine responses in the neonatal preclinical model. Her studies will involve the adoptive transfer of engineered human Ab followed by type A influenza challenge and vaccination of FcgR/C1q knock-out and humanized infant mice.
Jiang Gui
Jiang Gui’s research program involves identifying gene-gene interaction and gene-environment interactions. He has developed several novel non-parametric machine learning algorithms to detect and characterize gene-gene and gene-environment interactions in the absence of statistically significant main effects. These have been successfully applied it to a population-based bladder cancer study in New Hampshire and identified several biologically meaningful gene-gene interactions that have a stronger prognostic effect than smoking status, a well-known cancer risk factor. He also implemented these algorithms in an opensource software package (MDR 3.0) for all researchers. In addition, he has used the Weighted False Discovery Rate (WFDR) method to address the multiple comparison issue that arises from genome-wide association studies.
He also works with developing statistical and computational methods for relating high-dimensional microarray gene expression data to censored survival data. Since there is usually a large variation in time to a certain clinical event (e.g. tumor recurrence, disease onset), analysis focusing on time to response is clinically more relevant than simple classification. He has developed dimension reduction and penalized regression methods to overcome high-dimensionality and has built prediction models for patients’ survival probability. He also developed a Gaussian Graphical method to infer gene network for isoprenoid biosynthesis in Arabidopsis thaliana.
He is a co-investigator in Core 2 (PI: Hoen), and works closely with Dr. Hoen to support the biostatistical needs of the program.
Alice Hawkins
Alice Hawkins is a PhD Student at Imperial College London. Alice graduated with a BSc in Biochemistry from the University of Bath. She then joined the pharmaceutical company UCB where she worked as a research scientist; here she worked on the discovery of antibodies to multiple therapeutic immune targets and testing their functional activity. Alice then joined Imperial College London as a PhD student at the end of 2021. Her project part of Project 2, with the supervision of Dr. Beth Holder and Dr. Fiona Culley, to investigate the determinants of antibody transfer across the human placenta. To do this she develops in vitro models that mimic the maternal-fetal interface. Natural IgG variants and engineered antibodies can then be applied to these models to evaluate the transferred antibody repertoire and determine what drives transplacental IgG transfer.
Beth Holder
Beth Holder is a placental biologist and reproductive immunologist. Her research is focused on the interaction between the maternal immune system and the placenta during pregnancy. She has previously worked on a project studying the impact of maternal vaccination on the maternal and infant immune system, including antibody transfer and innate immune cells. She has also carried out research looking at awareness, access and attitudes to maternal vaccination.
For MADI, the Holder lab is setting up in vitro placental models to study antibody transfer. Together with Project 2 lead, Margie Ackerman, they will be using this model to investigate the determinants of trans-placental antibody transfer.
Insung Kang
Insung Kang was born and raised in South Korea. She obtained her Ph.D. at Seoul National University while working on disease modeling and developing therapeutic therapies based on stem cells and nanoparticles. In March of 2019, she joined NIH as a postdoctoral researcher to continue my research of interest in high throughput drug screening and gene screening. Now she is starting a new chapter at CBER ((FDA/CBER/OVRR/ DVP; ORISE Research Fellow) and working on placental inflammation and maternal immunity to SARS-CoV-2 and influenza under the mentorship of Dr. Hang Xie.
Dhvanir Kansara
Dhvanir Kansara, MS, PharmD is a graduate student in the Ackerman lab at Dartmouth College. His primary areas of research involve studying how biological components of maternal origin are transferred across the placenta and influence the fetal immune system as well as postnatal immune responses. Using high throughput tools, he investigates the modulation of maternal humoral immunity by changes in antibody levels, avidity, FcR binding capacity, glycosylation patterns, and innate cellular functions during gestation. He is actively involved with project 2 of MADI.
Martina Kosikova
Martina has a more than ten years’ experience in studying influenza virus with special focus on animal model and human serology to influenza infection and post-vaccination. Her featured research is about the “Original Antigenic Sin” of influenza infection.
Martina has been actively involved in bio-annual human serology studies in support of WHO influenza vaccine strain selection since 2016. She has also contributed to the collaborative studies for the establishment of 1st and 2nd WHO International Standard and Reference Panel for Anti-SARS-CoV-2 Antibodies.
She is a FDA/CBER/OVRR/ DVP Visiting Associate. Currently Martina is involved in several projects investigating the pathogenicity of SARS-CoV-2 variants in a transgenic mouse model and studying virus-specific immune responses elicited by infection and immunization. Specifically in the MADI collaboration, Martina is applying her serology skills (ELISA, HAI, MN, NAI, etc.) to help determine maternal antibody responses to influenza vaccines.
Jose M Lemme-Dumit
Jose M Lemme-Dumit is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at University of Maryland, Baltimore. He has experience in the fields of mucosal immunity and vaccines. His research interests are to identify mechanisms of responses at the surface of the mucosal lining, particularly, infants’ mucosae, and how maternal-derived components in breast milk protects the epithelial barriers. He has developed novel human in vitro models that better recapitulate the intestinal interface, and the interaction with specific innate immune cells (i.e., neutrophils, monocyte-derived macrophages and dendritic cells). These new models are totally derived from primary human cells which make them relevant for the studies of cell-to-cell communication, host-pathogen interaction, and innate immune defenses, and to evaluate host responses to preventive or therapeutic treatments.
Jose contributes to Project 1 by studying the molecular and cellular effects of maternal milk in human pediatric enteroids and the benefit for the infant’s epithelial immunity, and in the development of Bordetella pertussis functional assays including PTNA and opsonophagocytosis-mediated by antibodies.
Madi Newman
Madi Newman previously earned her Bachelor of Science in biology from Shippensburg University in 2019, while also earning a minor in biochemistry. In summer of 2022, Madi was awarded her Master of Science in biology from Towson University. She joined Dr. Pasetti’s lab and University of Maryland, Baltimore’s Center for Vaccine Development in August of 2022.
For her role in MADI, Madi is responsible for testing maternal serum and cord blood samples for Project 1. Madi is trained in several assay types: influenza and pertussis IgG enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (ELISAs), neuraminidase inhibition antibody enzyme-linked lectin assay (NAI-ELLA), spectral flow cytometry, and pertussis toxin neutralizing antibody (PTNA). She also assists in the development and optimization of these experiments.
Pieter Pannus
Pieter Pannus has worked for three years as an operational research coordinator for the humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders in different sub-Saharan African countries, and more recently coordinated a consortium of universities and research institutes investigating safety and immunogenicity of different COVID-19 vaccines in immunocompromised population groups. His scientific field of expertise is viro-immunology, with vaccination as one of the focuses, having worked in clinical trials investigating the efficacy of a therapeutic mRNA vaccine for HIV, as well as the previously mentioned COVID-19 vaccination trials.
For his role in the MADI, Pieter is the project manager responsible for the coordination of the MADI core cohorts activities at the consortium level, including clinical data and sample collection and management, sample distribution to MADI laboratories, sample testing and data analysis. Pieter will be in close contact will all MADI laboratories to identify tasks, monitor progress, foster communication between laboratories and help resolve issues. He will organize regular core cohorts steering committee meetings involving all MADI PIs and will assist PIs in producing study reports and in the writing of publications.
Susana Portillo
Susana Portillo is a Postdoctoral Fellow working on MADI Project 1. She joined University of Maryland, Baltimore Center for Vaccine Development as a Postdoctoral Fellow in July 2020. She works on maternal-infant immunity under the mentorship of Dr. Pasetti including evaluating qualitative and functional aspects of immune responses to Tetanus, Diphtheria and acellular Pertussis (TdaP) in pregnant women as well as the impact of maternal immunity on infant immune responses to routine vaccines.
Susana received a BS in Microbiology and PhD in Biosciences from The University of Texas at El Paso. Her dissertation focused on the use of alpha-Gal-containing neoglycoproteins as biomarkers and vaccine candidates for Chagas disease and Leishmaniasis. She is interested in immunology, with an emphasis in vaccinology in vulnerable populations.
In MADI Project 1, she will be using the MSD assay that she helped optimize and qualify for a previous pertussis study to obtaining antibody titers for other serum and breast milk cohorts. She is assisting in the development of the pertussis toxin neutralization and opsonophagocytic functional assays. She has been trained in systems serology at Ragon Institute and is establishing the technology at University of Maryland, Baltimore.
Shilpee Sharma
Shilpee Sharma is currently a Postdoctoral fellow at the University of Brussels, Belgium. During her postdoc Shilpee worked on the CYMAF consortium project on dissecting the “Antibody response to primary cytomegalovirus infection during pregnancy”. The goal is to identify the markers for the diagnosis of primary infection during pregnancy and to identify the correlates of protection, which can be utilized for the development of new vaccines and therapies against congenital HCMV infection. She played the lead role in setting-up system serology platform at ULB and participated in several collaborative projects with-in and outside the lab which includes IMPRINT, Indo-EU Influenza vaccine project and several projects on SARS-CoV-2. She did her Ph.D. from JNCASR, Bangalore, India and worked on HIV-1 subtype C genetic variation and replication fitness in Indian clinical cohorts. During her Ph.D., she worked at CBER, FDA for 3 months and visited CAPRISA to work on the South-Africa India Vaccine Research Collaboration IAVI project, which focused on HIV vaccine design.
Shilpee has expertise in System Serology, Molecular Virology (HIV), and Immunology. In her role for MADI, she examines Maternal Immunization and Determinants of Infant Immunity against Influenza, manages samples, and works on experiments plan/design and execution.
Her skills include systems-serology/immunology; characterization of the antibodies using Luminex platform, antibody mediated effector functions like- antibody mediated phagocytosis (ADCP, ADNP), antibody dependent complement deposition (ADCD), antibody dependent cellular cytotoxicity (ADCC), antibody glycan analysis using capillary-electrophoresis. Skills also include cell culture; basic cell culturing techniques, transfection, immunofluorescence using confocal and fluorescence microscopy, clinical sample handling (PBMC isolation), PBMC co-culture, ELISA, ELISPOT, Intracellular cytokine staining, flow cytometry, and proximity ligation assay. Additionally, her skills include virology (HIV); viral culture, neutralization and quantification assays; Virus production by transient transfection of molecular clones, infection of T-cell lines and co-culture with infected PBMC, estimation of viral titers by TCID50, pair-wise competition assay and replication kinetics of viruses, EBV virus handling, generation of B cell lines: Immortalization of B-cells using EBV, Influenza-serology assays-HI, MN, ELLA.
Anaïs Thiriard
Anaïs Thiriard is in her 3rd year of post-doctoral research in the Institute for Medical Immunology (future European Plotkin Institute for Vaccinology), lead by Arnaud Marchant in Bruxelles, Belgium. Her university curriculum was based on a Bachelor’s degree in Biochemistry, a Master’s degree in Prokaryote and Eukaryote Genetics and a Doctoral’s degree in Microbiology delivered by the University of Lille, France. She obtained her PhD after 3y (2016-2019) in the lab of Camille Locht (Pasteur Institute of Lille, France) working on the systemic and mucosal responses induced upon a B. pertussis infection or vaccination in different in vivo models. Her area of expertise based on molecular biology (cloning, conjugation, PCR) was to assess, through antigen and monoclonal antibody production, purification (WB, chromatography, electrophoresis), antibody functionality (SPR, avidity, ELISA, bactericidal luminescence assay, binding assay with confocal microscopy). She developed an expertise in mice experimentation and work in BLS2. She also had the opportunity to be implicated in the Pertussis Correlates of Protection Europe (Periscope) during her thesis.
Anaïs joined Dr. Marchant’s team in 2020 to work on the one hand on adult and pediatric serological responses against SARS-CoV-2 and on the other hand on the impact of maternal immunization on the infant antibody responses against Bordetella pertussis. She implements a system serology approach with in vitro multiplex assay based on fluorescence (Luminex, Flow cytometry) to assess biophysical and functional parameters of the Fc part of blood antibodies (isotypes, FcγR binding, complement activation, phagocytosis). Serum samples studied come from worldwide cohorts (Thailand, Vietnam, Belgium). She also has experience using a model of B. pertussis infection in neonate mice. She joined the MADI group project 3 from the outset and will apply this global approach to the core cohorts to determine which maternal antibody features regulates the infant vaccine responses. At this stage they are studying the outcomes of maternal immunization in pertussis-vaccinated children.
Aisha Yesbolatova
Aisha Yesbolatova, a postdoc in Jiwon Lee’s laboratory, works with MADI project 2. She has a background in protein function studies using targeted proteolysis and in vitro reconstitution assays, gene editing, and protein purification. As a member of MADI, she is involved in the antibody repertoire identification using B cell receptors sequencing (BCR-Seq) of maternal samples to determine the effect of vaccination on clonotype diversity.
Hang Xie
Hang Xie is a Research Biologist in the Division of Viral Products, Office of Vaccines Research & Review Regulatory Expertise, FDA. She has >17 years of regulatory review experience on CMC and clinical assays for influenza vaccines and challenge viruses, including pre-INDs, INDs and BLAs. She served as product reviewer in the US licensures of Fluad™ trivalent and quadrivalent influenza vaccines for adults of ≥65 years. She served as clinical assay reviewer in the US licensure of Shingrix (recombinant adjuvanted zoster vaccine) for adults of ≥50 years. She sits on the expert panel for WHO bio-annual influenza vaccine strain selection, and the Special technical evaluation panel for HHS-NIH-NIAID-BAA2018 – “Collaborative Influenza Vaccine Innovation Centers (CIVICs-Component A: Vaccine Center)”
Under her research Interests, she works on the viral pathogenesis and vaccine development for the emerging and reemerging respiratory RNA viruses, especially those with pandemic potential (e.g., highly pathogenic avian influenza, SARS-CoV-2, etc.). She works to identify the molecular determinants of viral pathogenicity via reverse genetics and characterize natural and vaccine-induced immune responses in human specimens and experimental animals. She investigates sex-biased differences in host immune defense, develops animal models to study maternal immunity during respiratory viral infection, and does serology method development.
Michael Scot Zens
Michael Scot Zens is a research scientist and applications engineer working with the MADI program to enable the harmonization, storage, and sharing of immunology data between projects and with the broader scientific community. Zens earned his PhD in ecology and evolutionary biology from Dartmouth College and trained in modelling and statistical methods at the University of Washington (Seattle).
He is currently Research Scientist at the Giesel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College where he designs and implements systems and analytical pipelines for delivering data and statistical analyses to research programs. In addition to hands- on Postgresql database and R/Shiny app development, Zens coordinates a diverse team of students and staff to develop a suite of software tools for collecting, managing, exploring and analyzing experimental cohort data in humans and animal model systems. Prior to joining The MADI Program, Zens was a Research Scientist focused on environmental risk factors for bladder cancer, melanoma and non-melanoma skin cancer. He designed systems to collect and manage and analyze data for the New Hampshire Birth Cohort.
Jie Zhou
Jie Zhou, a postdoc with Core 2/Anne Hoen, has been working with Dr. Hoen at Dartmouth College since July 2018. He obtained his Ph.D. in 2009 from the Department of Probability & Statistics at Xidian University, China. He has expertise in biomedical data analysis, including cross-sectional, longitudinal, and time series data.
After Jie joined Dr. Hoen’s lab, he mainly worked on -omic data analysis, particularly identifying the interaction between gut microbes, aiming to understand the way the microbiome affects infant immunity. Though interactions between the microbes are traditionally identified in the lab by culture-based methods, these methods are limited because most microbes can not be cultivated in the lab. However, with the help of high-throughput sequencing technology, now we can easily get omic data at a low cost, which allows us to use mathematical/statistical methods to identify such interactions. Up to now, we have proposed several novel methods to identify microbial interactions (see https://jiezhou-2.github.io/lglasso_data_analysis/index.html for the latest one of these methods)
Since the MADI project also involves many datasets, appropriate data analyses are important for drawing scientific conclusions from the study. In this respect, Jie is looking forward to collaborating with other researchers to explore the relationship between maternal immunization and infant immunity.