Jesse D. Bloom, Ph.D.

Research

My lab studies the evolution of viral proteins, including from influenza and SARS-CoV-2. We develop techniques to characterize the effects of viral mutations, with the goal of better forecasting how viruses might evolve and developing countermeasures that are more robust to evolution.

As an Innovation Fund investigator, Jesse Bloom, Ph.D., is teaming up with K. Christopher Garcia, Ph.D., to explore and exploit protein-protein recognition. Protein-protein interactions found in nature likely arose through a process of coevolution. This process is poorly understood, largely because existing analytical approaches can interrogate only one binding partner at a time. The Garcia lab recently developed a platform for coevolving two proteins within very large and diverse interface libraries for both partners. This platform enables both the deep study of protein-protein recognition and the engineering of protein-protein interactions that have practical utility as drugs or in biotechnology. Combining this coevolution platform with Bloom’s extensive expertise in predictive virology, the pair hopes to better understand protein binding as well as engineer antibodies that retain binding to their viral targets during evolution. The pair’s research could establish the utility of this coevolution platform for engineering proteins and test the innovative strategy of developing antibodies that are impervious to probable future mutations in SARS-CoV-2 or in cancers.