Heaton Lab
Principal Investigator: Nicholas S Heaton
Institution: Duke University (Durham, NC)
Primary Subfield: Immunology
Recruitment Status: ✅ Accepting PhD Students ✅ Hiring Postdocs
Research Focus
PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT Incomplete efficacy of current influenza vaccines is driven by the fact that they primarily induce responses against immunodominant but highly malleable epitopes in the globular head domain of the hemagglutinin (HA) glycoprotein. Because the virus undergoes antigenic drift at these sites, vaccines need to be updated annually and provide limited protection from heterologous strains. A longstanding concept in the field of universal influenza vaccine development is to redirect the immune response from these variable epitopes to more conserved viral protein domains, such as the HA stalk domain. Indeed, this has been successfully accomplished by vaccinating with “headless”, chimeric, or hyperglycosylated HA constructs among other approaches. These strategies, however, typically elicit improved stalk-directed responses at the expense of what would have likely been protective responses targeting the head domain. We hypothesized that we could simultaneously elicit both head- and stalk-directed responses by vaccinating with an antigenically complex mixture of HA proteins (with amino acid diversity in immunodominant HA head epitopes) that would, in effect, change the…
Active NIH Awards
- 1R01AI201207-01: Deciphering Immune Responses Induced by Complex Antigen Mixtures (2026)
- 1P01AI202707-01: The Duke Catalyzing Observations into Mechanistic Models of Influenza Transmission (COMMIT) Center (2026)
- 1P01AI202707-01: Admin Core (2026)
- 1P01AI202707-01: Environmental and Respiratory Matrix Contributions to Influenza Virus Persistence and Transmissibility - Project 3 (2026)
- 1R01AI198137-01: Mechanisms underlying combination adjuvant-driven improvement of influenza vaccine responses (2026)
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