Campus event to celebrate heroes in health and science related to COVID-19 vaccines

[ad_1]

WHAT: The University of Texas at Austin, along with officials from the City of Austin, will honor science and health champions who helped develop COVID-19 vaccines and get Texans vaccinated.

WHEN: Wednesday, November 17, 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. There will be an outdoor celebration including stage performances, remarks, balloons, live music from Nané, liquid nitrogen ice cream, a pop-up window on vaccines, interactive displays and more. Photo shoot of the inventor of the vaccine receiving his booster at 4:10 p.m. The stage program begins at 4:30 p.m.

O: UT Austin’s Main Mall (south walk from UT tower)

Professor Jason McLellan is among those honored at the vaccination celebration.

Scientists at UT Austin have been at the forefront of the coronavirus vaccine race since shortly after the first reports of a mysterious virus circulating in Wuhan, China. Dr. Jason McLellan, professor of molecular biosciences and researchers in his Nianshuang Wang and Daniel Wrapp lab, worked over a weekend in early January 2020 with scientists from the National Institutes of Health’s Vaccine Research Center to develop a key component of COVID-vaccines. 19, the spike protein that causes the body to produce antibodies that fight the virus. All COVID-19 vaccines currently in use in the United States use advanced protein vaccine antigens based on work McLellan and Wang did together in 2016 to stabilize the spike protein through the addition of two rigid amino acids called prolines – essentially molecular staples – exchanged in the genetic code to help produce a stronger protective immune response.

“What powers our current vaccines is an innovation that is the result of many years of hard work by these UT scientists and their collaborators,” said David Vanden Bout, Acting Dean of the College of Natural Sciences. “It’s hard to imagine where we would be now without their efforts. “

Wednesday’s event, postponed from October when originally scheduled but delayed due to weather, coincides with International Education Week and recognizes the global impact of COVID-19 vaccines. As of this month, just over half of the world’s population has received at least one dose of the coronavirus vaccine, although large gaps remain between poor and rich countries. Several COVID-19 vaccines in clinical trials now around the world promise more affordable vaccine access in low- and middle-income countries and use another stabilized spike protein from UT called HexaPro. This team was led by McLellan and postdoctoral researcher Ching-Lin Hsieh; Ilya Finkelstein, associate professor in the Department of Molecular Biosciences; and Jennifer Maynard, professor in the chemical engineering department at the Cockrell School of Engineering.

Everyone is welcome on November 17 at the Main Mall from 4 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.

Wednesday’s event honors those scientists as well as the researchers, healthcare professionals and volunteers who have contributed to the success of vaccines locally by helping to immunize people both on campus and in the community at large. To date, the UT Vaccination Hub has administered more than 147,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccines. As one of the first entities in Texas to receive the vaccine in December 2020, the UT Vaccination Hub played an important role in the early vaccination of members of the Austin healthcare community, and then helped to vaccinate eligible Austin residents and members of the college community. The effort involved several partners on campus, including UT Health Austin, Dell Medical School, School of Nursing, Steve Hicks School of Social Work, College of Pharmacy, University Health Services, and Financial Services. and administrative.

Since the start of the pandemic, the City of Austin and Austin Public Health have worked closely with leaders from Dell Medical School and members of the UT COVID-19 Modeling Consortium, led by the Professor of Integrative Biology, Statistics and data science Lauren Ancel Meyers. , to respond to the virus. The city used a phased alert system, designed in part by scientists and health experts at UT, to guide local policies, resulting in fewer hospital surges and shorter lockdowns than would have been otherwise expected, according to research published in Nature Communications this summer. The Austin metropolitan area had the lowest per capita COVID-19 death rate among any major city in Texas, with a death rate less than half that of the state as a whole. It also has the highest vaccination rate among major cities in Texas, according to the Texas Tribune.

“If the state had the same COVID death rate as Austin-Travis County, more than 25,000 Texans would not have died from this virus,” Austin Mayor Steve Adler said in his August speech on the State of the City, acknowledging the contributions of Meyers, Dell Medical School, Walkes and others.

The university had tower lighting in October on the originally scheduled date for the vaccination celebration, which also recognized the contributions of McLellan collaborator Dr Barney Graham, former deputy director of the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institutes of Health and a special guest day from the Department of Molecular Biosciences. The October event, also held with students from the college’s Natural Sciences Council, was postponed due to inclement weather.

As the first anniversary of the first authorization of COVID-19 vaccines approaches, the contributions of McLellan and his collaborators have been recognized repeatedly, including in new books by bestselling authors. Austin author Lawrence Wright wrote The Plague Year, which was published in June, while A Shot to Save the World by Wall Street Journal reporter Gregory Zuckerman and The First Shots by Brendan Borrell were published this fall. Borrell’s book was chosen by HBO for a series by director Adam McKay. In addition, the Texas State Bar’s Intellectual Property Law Section recently awarded McLellan its annual Texas Inventor of the Year Award, in recognition of how his work has “a significant impact on the Texas economy ”.

[ad_2]