There’s limited information about which parts of the SARS-CoV-2 virus elicit a strong immune response, which is extremely relevant in the design of promising vaccine candidates. Richard Scheuermann, Director of JCVI’s La Jolla facility, and his collaborators recently published a first analysis of the most promising epitope targets, based on analysis the SARS-CoV (2003) and the novel SARS-CoV-2 (2019). Richard will describe the findings, and also discuss:

• Some background on coronavirus features and its evolution
• Computational approaches in therapy and vaccine development
• B-cell versus T-cell strategies for fighting COVID-19
• How we can develop more effective vaccines using conserved epitope strategies

J. Craig Venter was scheduled to join this SynBioBeta Town Hall. In response to intense interest about JCVI's research on SARS-CoV-2 epitopes, Craig has asked the leader of this work, Richard Scheuermann, to be our guest in tomorrow's discussion. Craig will join us for a broader discussion about the state of the synthetic biology industry in the coming weeks.Richard Scheuermann, Ph.D., is the Director of the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) La Jolla Campus, and an Adjunct Professor of Pathology at U.C. San Diego. He applies his molecular immunology and infectious disease expertise in developing computational data mining methods and knowledge representation approaches, including the development of biomedical ontologies and their use in data mining, and the development of novel methods for gene expression, protein network, flow cytometry, and comparative genomics data analysis. A recent focus is computational methods and analytical pipelines incorporating machine learning approaches to process and analyze single cell and single nuclei RNA sequencing data.