ROF ENNYMOORE
South African research chair of virushost dynamics at the University of the Witwatersrand and associate professor at the National Institute for Communicable Diseases
The national outbreak of the Covid- pandemic required scientists to take a lead in ground-breaking research, and quickly Moore and her team turned the historically I research lab into a hour operation that generates critical data required for the national response.
ivoting from a focus on I to Covidwas enabled by tweaking platforms used for I research to conduct Covidresearch. To cope with the immense workload and high stress levels, she recruited scientists who were formerly associated with the lab to return and contribute to the growing body of work. “I’ve been involved in understanding how to neutralise antibody responses, and primarily the types of antibodies that vaccines trigger. We’ve worked in
I for more than years focused on I vaccine design, which is still a major problem in South Africa. From a technical SHUVSHFWLYH LW ZDVQȢW GLIˋFXOW IRU RXU ODE to pivot from I research to Covidresearch, we’re doing almost the same thing as we’ve been doing for I all these years,” e plains Moore.
The emergence of variances caused chaos for her research, placing her amongst WKH ˋUVW ODE OHDGHUV LQ WKH ZRUOG WR VKRZ the mutations of the variants and the functional implications for vaccines, as well as best ways to approach reinfections.
She credits the country’s rapid response to the epidemic to the vast e perience gleaned from clinical trials, basic biology and immunology. “$V
D FRXQWU\ DV D VFLHQWLˋF FRPPXQLW\ we leveraged everything we had very effectively to deal with Covid- . It’s been e traordinary that we are one of the world leaders, and that’s because the people who are doing the sequencing leveraged everything they’ve already been doing over a very long time,” she says.
For Moore, the ne t challenge is to ramp up South Africa’s capacity to produce local vaccines for all pathogens that could lead to further pandemics.
Apart from her ongoing global contribution to Covid- , Moore’s greatest highlights include her involvement in the ongoing study by the Centre for the Aids rogramme of Research in South Africa on a group of women who are based in wa ulu- atal since .
“Studying these women who live in a very high-risk area and many of them are I positive, has given us a roadmap to how an I vaccine could be developed.” “Many of those women are elite neutralisers and developed a very powerful antibody response that we hope one day will lead to an I vaccine. A major highlight for us is one woman who developed incredible antibodies and we’ve been able to clone the samples she provided to make antibodies,” she adds.