How T-cell Focused COVID Vaccines Can Move Us Toward Endemicity

Dr. Harlan Robins, Chief Scientific Officer and co-founder of Adaptive Biotechnologies discusses why vaccine sponsors need to rethink vaccine design to take advantage of the T cell immune response to COVID-19 variants. Dr. Robins and his company have been at the forefront of studying the cellular immune response to SARS-CoV-2 with their immune sequencing technology. 

Dr. Robins is the Chief Scientific Officer and Co-Founder of Adaptive Biotechnologies, a commercial-stage biotech company that aims to translate the genetics of the adaptive immune system into clinical products to diagnose and treat disease.Prior to co-founding Adaptive, Harlan served in various roles at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (FHCRC) in the Computational Biology Program, including Assistant Faculty Member, Associate, and Full Member and Head of the program.Harlan holds a BS in Physics from Harvard University and a master’s degree and PhD in Physics from the University of California, Berkeley, with a visiting appointment to the California Institute of Technology. Harlan received postdoctoral appointments in the particle theory group at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.Interested in the mathematics behind genetics and observing the potential utility of high-level mathematics to study problems in the biological sciences, Harlan took another postdoctoral appointment at the Institute for Advance Study in Princeton under famed biologist Dr. Arnold Levine. With Dr. Levine, he concentrated on developing bioinformatic algorithms for micro RNA targets and bacterial genome analysis, a precursor to his faculty appointment at FHCRC in the Computational Biology Group, Public Health Sciences and Human Biology Divisions.