• Originally from Germany, moved to U.S. for graduate school - and never left 😄.
• PhD in Physics at Georgia Tech, Postdoc in Computational Biology at Emory.
• Since 2009, Assistant/Associate/Full Professor in Epidemiology & Biostatistics, University of Georgia.
• Data analysis and modeling of infectious diseases on the population and individual host levels.
• Mainly influenza and norovirus, some TB and other bugs. Recently also a lot of SARS-CoV-2.
• More information:
  • https://www.andreashandel.com
  • https://handelgroup.uga.edu

• After 15+ years of basic science/research, I want to move towards more applied work.
• To get that process started, I want to do a short term (approx. 8 month) industry “internship”.
• This presentation is part of my looking for something effort.

• Part 1: Research on dosing for vaccines
• Part 2: Various other projects (R packages, online courses)
• Part 3: Q&A

• Inoculum dose is an important determinant of infection and vaccination outcomes.
• For infection, higher dose is often associated with greater risk of infection (ID50) and more severe outcomes (LD50).
• For vaccines, dose is thought to impact both immunogenicity/efficacy and side effects (morbidity).

• Trade-offs between availability/safety and efficacy likely exist.
• Impact of dose on vaccine efficacy might not be monotone.

• Impact of dose on homologous or heterologous protection might not be monotone.

• A few doses are explored in phase 1 and 2 trials.
• Based on those data, one of the doses is chosen for phase 3 trials (and beyond) in a non-rigorous manner.

Example of BioNTech/Pfizer COVID Vaccine

Claim: Knowing in more detail how dose impacts host response following vaccination might help optimize vaccines.

• Open cohort of individuals who were vaccinated (some repeatedly) during the 2014/15 - 2018/19 flu seasons.
• The default vaccine was the trivalent or quadrivalent standard dose (SD, 15µg) Fluzone vaccine.
• Individuals >=65 years were offered the high-dose (HD, 60µg) trivalent vaccine.
• We evaluated immune response following vaccination, specifically antibodies as measured by hemagglutination inhibition assay (HAI).

Question: What is the impact of standard dose (SD) versus high dose (HD) vaccine on HAI antibodies?