May 25th, 2023. Christian Gallardo gave an oral presentation at the “Latency” session at the 2023 Retroviruses Meeting at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory reporting on his studies developing quantitative full-length sequencing approaches to interrogate the HIV-1 transcriptome in primary cell derived models of latency.
May 19th, 2023. Congratulations to Mariam Khan and Trisha Yu for presenting their work at the 2023 UW Undergraduate Research Symposium. Trisha’s work focused on the validation of an HIV-1 Gag proximal protein for its role in phenotypic variance in differentiated THP-1 cells. Mariam’s work focused on the role of HK-3 on cell viability after differentiation. Congrats for a job well done!
March 9th, 2023. Congratulations to Christian Gallardo on being awarded a Phase 1 Technology Commercialization Grant from the Washington Research Foundation for his project titled “Improving and simplifying high throughput RNA sequencing with CASPR, a novel reagent class“.
February 10th, 2023. Congratulations to Eirini Vamva and Stosh Ozog for their manuscript “A lentiviral vector B cell gene therapy platform for the delivery of the anti-HIV-1 eCD4-Ig-Knob-in-Hole-Reversed immunoadhesin”, now published in Molecular Therapy-Methods & Clinical Development (Cell Press). Many thanks to co-authors and collaborators at the Farzan, Rawlings, Zwick, and James Labs.
February 7th, 2023. The Torbett Lab welcomes Dr. Tai-Wei Li, and Dr. Craig Schindewolf who join the lab as Postdoctoral Fellows.
January 19th, 2023. Torbett Lab Members attend the B-HIVE Center Face to Face Meeting at the Emory Conference Center in Atlanta, GA. Mia Faerch, Chet Ohja, and Jade Wolff present posters of their work and engage in fruitful discussions with collaborators. Christian Gallardo chairs “Sequencing and Bioinformatics” session.
December 22nd, 2022. Congratulations to Christian Gallardo and collaborators at the Sarafianos Lab for their manuscript “Activation of HIV-1 proviruses increases downstream chromatin accessibility” published in iScience.
October 8th, 2022. Bruce Torbett, Christian Gallardo, and Shiyi Wang present their work at the Twenty-Sixth West Coast Retrovirus Meeting in Palm Springs.
August 10th, 2022. Dr. Mia Faerch joins the Torbett Lab as a Staff Scientist. Dr. Faerch brings experience in protein biochemistry and biophysics, and will be involved in work to delineate interactions between HIV and host proteins, along with studies on small molecule binding to viral proteins.
July 7th, 2022. Congratulations to Dr. Bruce Torbett on his $29M award from NIH/NIAID to establish and support the Behavior of HIV In Viral Environments (B-HIVE) Center, a multi-institutional program comprising 31 leading HIV researchers at 15 U.S. institutions and one in England. One of six funded centers nationally, B-HIVE is a highly collaborative project that will study HIV at the atomic, genomic and biological level.
June 23rd, 2022. Congratulations to Christian Gallardo for his manuscript “Selective ablation of 3′ RNA ends and processive RTs facilitate direct cDNA sequencing of full-length host cell and viral transcripts”, published in Nucleic Acids Research. Thanks to co-authors and close collaborators at the Routh Lab at UTMB.
June 21st, 2022. Dr. Chet Ojha joins the Torbett Lab as a Staff Scientist. Dr. Ojha brings breadth and depth of experience in virology, and will be involved in studies on the effect of opioids on HIV entry, and in work related to lentiviral vector gene delivery.
May 26th, 2022. Christian Gallardo gave an oral presentation at the “Transcription and Splicing” session at the 2022 Retroviruses Meeting at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory reporting on his studies developing novel sequencing approaches to simultaneously sequence full-length host cell and HIV-1 transcripts without PCR amplification.
May 18th, 2022. Eirini Vamva gave an oral presentation at the 25th annual American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy reporting on her studies using a Lentiviral Vector to deliver the eCD4-Ig immunoadhesin to human B cells to enable HIV-1 neutralization.
May 11th, 2022. Congratulations to Kristina Seiler for her manuscript “Hexokinase 3 enhances myeloid cell survival via non-glycolytic functions”, published in Cell Death and Disease. Thanks to co-authors and close collaborators at the Tschan Lab at University of Bern.
March 18th, 2022. Congrats to Eirini Vamva for her manuscript “An optimized measles virus glycoprotein-pseudotyped lentiviral vector production system to promote efficient transduction of human primary B cells“, now published in STAR Protocols (Cell Press). Thanks to co-authors and collaborators at the Verhoeyen, James, and Rawlings Lab.
January 8th, 2022. Congratulations to Shiyi Wang for her manuscript “Covariation of viral recombination with single nucleotide variants during virus evolution revealed by CoVaMa“, now published in Nucleic Acids Research. Thanks to co-authors and close collaborators at the Routh Lab at UTMB.
October 19th, 2021. Eirini Vamva presents a Poster at the European Society for Gene and Cell Therapy Annual Congress on her work using Lentiviral Vector Delivery of eCD4-Ig to support HIV-1 neutralization.
July 9th, 2021. Congratulations to senior author Christian Gallardo, and Shiyi Wang, for their manuscript “MrHAMER yields highly accurate single molecule viral sequences enabling analysis of intra-host evolution”, now published in Nucleic Acids Research. Thanks to co-authors and collaborators at UCSD and UTMB.
May 25th, 2021. Torbett Lab members Christian Gallardo, Eirini Vamva, and Shentian Zhuang present Posters at the 2021 Retroviruses CSHL Meeting.
May 29th, 2021. Christian Gallardo presents at London Calling 2021 , the yearly Oxford Nanopore Sequencing conference, on the lab’s highly accurate nanopore sequencing approaches (MrHAMER).
March 31st, 2021. Congratulations to Chris Garza, joint Grad Student with the Forli Lab at TSRI, on a successful Advancement to Candidacy as part of the Scripps Research Doctoral Program . Committee Members include Ashok Deniz, PhD (TSRI), Lisa Racki, PhD (TSRI), Phil Dawson, PhD (TSRI), and David Goodsell, PhD (TSRI).
March 30th, 2021. Congratulations to Shiyi Wang on a successful Advancement to Candidacy as part of the M3D PhD Program at UW. Committee Members include Lisa Frenkel, MD (UW), Deborah Fuller, PhD (UW), Jesse Bloom, PhD (Fred Hutch), and Pejman Mohammadi, Ph.D (TSRI, External Examiner).
March 6th, 2021. Christian Gallardo presents his work at vCROI 2021 on new full-length sequencing approaches to interrogate the evolution of HIV drug resistance
March 5th, 2021. Congratulations to Shentian Zhuang for her manuscript “Interactions of HIV-1 Capsid with Host Factors and Their Implications for Developing Novel Therapeutics”, now published in Viruses .
January 8th, 2021. Christian Gallardo presents at HIVE Winter FTF Meeting on updates on highly accurate sequencing of patient isolates to interrogate in vivo evolution of drug resistance to cART.
September 1st, 2020. The Torbett Lab moves to Seattle Children’s Research Institute (SCRI) and the University of Washington (UW) Dept. of Pediatrics. The Lab will be part of the Center for Immunity and Immunotherapies at the Jack R. MacDonald Building in SCRI’s Research Campus in the bustling Denny Triangle neighborhood in Downtown Seattle.