Presentations – W. Zane Billings

Antigenic distance has a nonlinear negative impact on the humoral response to seasonal influenza vaccination in elderly individuals even after controlling for preexisting antibody titers

poster

flu

vaccines

research

Antigenic drift occurs when influenza strains accumulate enough mutations to escape immune memory. While antigenic drift is known to be a major problem in the development of influenza vaccines, quantifying the effect of antigenic drift on the immune response after vaccination is more difficult. We use data from an influenza vaccine cohort where a panel of heterologous HAI assays was conducted on each individual’s serum samples, and we computed the antigenic distance between each of the assay strains and the strain used for vaccination to estimate the effect of antigenic distance on vaccine immunogenicity. We found nonlinear negative patterns for both H3N2 and H1N1 influenza strains.

😱 SUPERCHARGE 🌩 YOUR LIT REVIEW 📖 WORKFLOW WITH 🤖 ~AI TOOLS~ 🤯

talk

other

While I might be a dyed-in-the-wool AI hater, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a very limited subset of useful AI tools. Usually those are the ones that aren’t plagiarism machines.

Quantifying the effect of HD vs SD FluZone vaccination on heterologous immunity

talk

research

Research talk given at the 2024 DIVERsity (drivers of individual variation in influenza vaccine response and protection from infection) grant annual meeting. We use data from a human influenza vaccine cohort study with HAIs collected to a panel of historical strains to analyze the causal effect of high dose vaccination on the heterologous antibody response.

Modeling Censored Immunological Data

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other

Publicity for the censored data tutorials we’re writing!

Quantifying the breadth of vaccine response with antigenic distance

talk

flu

vaccines

research

What does it even mean when we talk about vaccine breadth? If we have a universal vaccine candidate, how can we calculate its breadth? We propose a framework utilizing antigenic distance and summary antibody landscapes based on data from cohort studies with panels of immunogenicity data to multiple strains.

Reproducible research workshop

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other

Intro to reproducible research and R workflows for PopBio

Dissertation Proposal

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other

Impact of Host and Vaccine Characteristics on Immune Responses following Influenza Vaccination

Intro to Open Science, v2

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other

Open science is a pretty broad term that broadly includes data sharing, open access publication, inclusive research, preregistration, and more! In this talk, I gave an intro to the concept of open science at a seminar for the Center for the Ecology of Infectious Disease (CEID) at UGA.

Intro to Open Science

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other

Open science is a pretty broad term that broadly includes data sharing, open access publication, inclusive research, preregistration, and more! In this talk, I gave an intro to the concept of open science for my weekly working group.

Journal club (Nauta et al.)

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other

Slides from a paper discussion that I led at my seminar.

Challenge Study Ethics

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other

Challenge studies need to be highly regulated to ensure they are beneficial rather than harmful. I led a discussion with one of my colleagues about some of these ethical issues.

Longitudinal trajectories of influenza immune response after repeat vaccination

talk

flu

vaccines

research

trajectories

Repeat vaccination is sort of a hot topic in flu immunity right now, but most analyses are still done in a cross-sectional format. Using data from an ongoing influenza vaccination cohort study, we break trajectories up into component segments to analyze patterns of boosting and waning. This allows us to quantify trends across strata and allow for measurement error in responses of a specific magnitude.

How do pre-existing immunity and host factors interact to impact influenza vaccine response?

talk

flu

vaccines

research

Some prior mechanistic modeling studies show that dose should modulate the effect of an influenza vaccine, but do not make strong predictions about the roles of covariates. Using data from an ongoing cohort study, we examine these predictions and also examine whether other covariates should be included in future models.

Exploring the effect of host factors on the relationship between pre-existing immunity and influenza vaccine response

poster

flu

vaccines

research

Mechanistic models suggest that fold change in flu immunity after vaccination should be linearly decreasing with pre-vaccination immunity. However, these models do not account for host factors, such as age. We found that mechanistic model predictions were sometimes supported by the data, and we are working to explore when they are and are not.

How does pre-existing immunity interact with other factors to impact influenza vaccine responses?

talk

flu

vaccines

research

Previous mechanistic models predict that fold change in influenza antibody level should have a negative linear relationship with pre-vaccination titer on a log-log scale. Models also predict that higher vaccine doses should have a higher intercept, but parallel slopes. Using vaccine cohort data, we found that the first conclusion was true, but the latter was not always true. Now we are working to understand in which cases the model deviates from expected predictions.

W. Zane Billings