Chuck Shoemaker, a professor in the Department of Infectious Disease and Global Health at Cummings School, is currently working to harness antibodies’ unique skillset as pathogen hunters. Ultimately, he says, he’s aiming to turbocharge their abilities in the lab, and use the resulting über-antibodies as components of new treatments for deadly diseases. Shoemaker works specifically with antibodies from camelids (animals like alpacas), which have a simpler structure than most other mammalian antibodies and can much more easily be re-engineered for use in therapies or diagnostic tests.
