Dr. Ebony Gary Receives Mathilde Krim Fellowship in Biomedical Research

Thanks to the dogged pursuit of a project she started during her Ph.D. studies, Wistar’s Dr. Ebony Gary recently received a highly competitive Mathilde Krim Fellowship in Biomedical Research from amfAR. The grant, named for amfAR’s founding chairman, provides early-career researchers with $180,000 over two years to pursue research into HIV/AIDS.

“Receiving this is really a confirmation that I’m on the right path, and that is very rewarding personally,” expressed Dr. Gary. “It is also the first time that I have my own independent funding, enabling me to establish my own research focus. It gives me the intellectual and financial freedom to explore basic immunology in a way that could have real translational impact.”

The fellowship will allow Dr. Gary, a Research Assistant Professor in Dr. David Weiner’s lab, to further study the use of an enzyme, Adenosine Deaminase-1 (ADA-1) as an adjuvant to improve HIV vaccine efficacy.

ADA-1 is an enzyme with important roles in immune cell biology. When delivered alongside a vaccine antigen, ADA-1 has the potential to enhance vaccine-induced immune responses, including antibody production and killer T cell activity. However, the mechanisms underlying its immune-enhancing effects remain incompletely understood. Dr. Gary’s work aims to determine how and why ADA-1 performs this role, with the goal of informing new strategies to improve HIV vaccine outcomes.

“I have demonstrated that ADA-1 is an immune enhancing adjuvant that strongly improves vaccine immunity, including to HIV vaccines, but it’s really complex as a molecule,” she explained. “The Krim fellowship enables me to do is study how ADA-1 really works from an immunological perspective. We don’t really have a good understanding of what it is doing molecularly, so defining those details could be very useful for making a successful HIV vaccine.”

Dr. Gary studied adjuvants to enhance HIV vaccine responses, including native ADA-1 during her graduate studies at Drexel University, but its potential as a vaccine adjuvant remained an unanswered question she felt strongly about pursuing.

“When I joined the lab, I had been working almost exclusively on HIV, but Dr. Weiner encouraged me to focus on cancer, which was new to me,” she said. After several months, though, COVID hit and the lab shifted to focus almost entirely toward working on a vaccine. “We demonstrated that native ADA-1 also supported strong immune responses to SARS-CoV-2 vaccine antigens in young and aged mouse models.”

How the enzyme does this, though, remained an intriguing unanswered question, and one that Dr. Gary was reluctant to let go.

“We had really promising data, but there were other priorities in the lab and I just kept working on this in the background,” she explained. “We designed modified ADA-1 molecules in order to evaluate which specific parts of ADA-1 are necessary for immune enhancement.” After some positive results demonstrated the efficacy of her adjuvant, Dr. Weiner strongly encouraged her to pursue the work and secure funding.

She said, “You need to be flexible enough to work on varied projects, but you need to be persistent enough to pursue projects that your gut is telling you are worthwhile.”

Dr. Gary’s persistence paid off in spades. Now, thanks to this prestigious amfAR grant, Dr. Gary can see her research to fruition and show the potential to improve HIV vaccines and beyond.