Personal information
Biography
Dr. Jaworski has been working in the virology and immunopathology field during the last 15 years. He started his academic training at the National Institute of Agricultural Technology in Argentina (INTA), studying the Epidemiology of Foot-and-mouth disease virus. In 2011 he completed a three-year postdoctoral training in Dr. Haigwood’s Laboratory at the Oregon National Primate Research Center (ONPRC) and the Vaccine & Gene Therapy Institute (VGTI), both part of the Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU). During this training, Dr. Jaworski has served as a leader in two different projects, coordinating all aspects of the projects with the veterinary and animal care staff, overseeing and directing the research technician who was his co-worker, performing pivotal experiments and writing several scientific articles himself all the while.
In the first half of his postdoctoral training, he developed a scaffold protein-based HIV vaccine (E2-V3 and E2-gp41) and showed that the co-immunization using this system plus DNA (gp160), was effective in eliciting a rapid, strong, sustained neutralizing antibody responses, better than levels reported to date with other HIV vaccine candidate [http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0031464]. In the second part of his training, Dr. Jaworski took on the leadership of a project aimed to explore the benefits of passively transferred neutralizing antibodies (NAbs) on the prevention of mother-to-child-transmission (pMTCT) of HIV-1. For this purpose, he set up a newborn Rhesus macaque model at the ONPRC. These landmark studies showed that SHIV was highly pathogenic in newborns and levels of antibodies much lower than previously tested could be effective not only in mediating viral control, but also inducing a rapid development of neutralizing antibodies, a new and exciting finding. In 2016, the group reported for the first time the clearance of SHIV infection from NHP using passive bNmAbs treatment [FrontiersIMM:http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fimmu.2016.00661/full; JVI:http://jvi.asm.org/content/87/19/10447.long; NATURE:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4983100/; NATURE:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2952052/].
In 2012 he returned to Argentina to continue his research as Staff Scientist at INTA, and since 2014, also as Researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET).
CURRENT PROJECTS:
(i) Study of the role of the stress in the pathogenesis of Retroviruses (i.e., Bovine Leukemia Virus, Human T Leukemia Virus, etc.)-FUNDED:INTA-PNSA1115054
(ii) Study of micro-RNAs as mediators of pathogenesis in viral infection-FUNDED:ANPCyT-PICT-2017
(iii) Study of micro-RNAs as novel biomarkers for viral infection-FUNDED PUE/PIP (CONICET)
Activities
Education and qualifications (4)
Works (30)