Erica Ollmann Saphire, PhD

Erica Ollmann Saphire, Ph.D. serves as President and CEO of the La Jolla Institute for Immunology. She is one of the world’s leading experts in pandemic and emerging viruses, such as Ebola, Marburg and Lassa. Dr. Saphire directs the Viral Hemorrhagic Fever Immunotherapeutic Consortium (VIC), an NIH-funded Center of Excellence in Translational Research. The VIC unites 43 previously competing academic, industrial and government labs across five continents to understand which antibodies are most effective in patients and to streamline the research pipeline to provide antibody therapeutics against Ebola, Marburg, Lassa and other viruses. Dr. Saphire's research explains, at the molecular level, how and why viruses like Ebola and Lassa are pathogenic and provides the roadmap for developing antibody-based treatments. Her team has solved the structures of the Ebola, Sudan, Marburg, Bundibugyo and Lassa virus glycoproteins, explained how they remodel these structures as they drive themselves into cells, how their proteins suppress immune function and where human antibodies can defeat these viruses. A recent discovery revealed why neutralizing antibodies had been so difficult to elicit against Lassa virus, and provided not only the templates for the needed vaccine, but the molecule itself: a Lassa surface glycoprotein engineered to remain in the right conformation to inspire the needed antibody response. This molecule is the basis for international vaccine efforts against Lassa.
Dr. Saphire is the recipient of numerous accolades and grants, including the Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering presented by President Obama at the White House; the Gallo Award for Scientific Excellence and Leadership from the Global Virus Network; young investigator awards from the International Congress of Antiviral Research, the American Society for Microbiology, American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, and the MRC Centre for Virus Research in the United Kingdom; the Investigators in the Pathogenesis of Infectious Disease Award from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, and the Surhain Sidhu award for the most outstanding contribution to the field of diffraction by a person within five years of the Ph.D. Dr. Saphire has been awarded a Fulbright Global Scholar fellowship from the United States Department of State and a Mercator Fellowship from the German research foundation, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, to develop international collaborations around human health and molecular imaging through cryoelectron microscopy.
Dr. Saphire received a B.A. in biochemistry and cell biology and ecology and evolutionary biology from Rice University in Houston, Texas, and a Ph.D. in molecular biology from Scripps Research. She stayed on at Scripps Research as a Research Associate to conduct postdoctoral research and rose through the ranks to become a Professor in the Department of Immunology and Microbiology. In early 2019, Dr. Saphire joined La Jolla Institute for Immunology to establish a molecular imaging facility for cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) at the Institute. The extremely detailed images produced by cryo-EM reveal precisely how essential mechanisms of the immune system operate.