# Influenza responses and repertoire in vaccination, infection and tonsil organoids.

> **NIH NIH U19** · STANFORD UNIVERSITY · 2020 · $3,874,619

## Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY
Wuhan, China is the epicenter of a rapidly spreading pandemic the World Health Organization (WHO) has
officially designated as COVID-19. COVID-19 is caused by SARS-CoV-2, but how it is spread from person to
person is still unclear. The asymptomatic presentation of the disease, and widespread travel out of Wuhan have
permitted its rapid dissemination. As of March 16, 2020, there are over 175,000 cases affecting 162 countries
with over 6,700 fatalities worldwide. SARS-CoV-2 is positive-sense RNA virus infecting vertebrate hosts that
exists in a group of closely related co-evolving entities of which two others – SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV – have
caused recent epidemics. Due to the complexity of anti-viral immunity, experience with other viruses has shown
that swift success in vaccine development is by no means assured. A major challenge is the difficulty in
adequately characterizing T cell-mediated recognition of viral epitopes. Finding the major shared specificities in
COVID-19 subjects will help us understand what the most important CD4+ and CD8+ T cell responses will be.
These findings can be deployed to determine the optimal vaccine formulation so as to elicit these T cell
specificities. We hypothesize that T cell responses to specific epitopes of SARS-CoV-2 will be critical for
its control in infected patients across diverse HLA haplotypes, and that a comprehensive mapping of
epitopes recognized by those who clear the virus and their cognate TCRs will facilitate the development
of the most effective vaccines for COVID-19 treatment. To pursue this hypothesis, we will employ some very
new tools for T cell responses that have recently been developed at Stanford and the Princess Margaret Cancer
Center, together with COVID-19 survivors’ blood samples obtained in Toronto, Hong Kong and Stanford.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10142952
- **Project number:** 3U19AI057229-17S1
- **Recipient organization:** STANFORD UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** Mark Morris Davis
- **Activity code:** U19 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $3,874,619
- **Award type:** 3
- **Project period:** 2020-05-19 → 2022-03-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10142952

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10142952, Influenza responses and repertoire in vaccination, infection and tonsil organoids. (3U19AI057229-17S1). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10142952. Licensed CC0.

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