Jonathan Ball

Our interests focus on antibody-based vaccine and/or therapeutic monoclonal antibody discovery for emerging virus infections, such as Ebola, Lassa Fever, Nipah, SARS-related coronaviruses to name a few. Antibody discovery platforms being utilised include direct single cell cloning of human and/or bovine antibody repertoires. As part of this work, we also investigate the role of virus evolution in antibody escape and also its influence on cell and host tropism. Finally, we are applying high throughput DNA sequencing (metagenomics) for virus discovery, then using surrogate cell infection assays (especially lentivirus and retrovirus-based pseudovirus assays) to determine the host-range, and therefore zoonotic and epizootic potential (ie. species-jumps) of newly discovered viruses.