Jianliang Xu

Jianliang Xu is an Assistant Professor of Biology at Georgia State University. He obtained his Ph.D. degree in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Nanjing University in China. Dr. Xu did his postdoctoral training with Professor Tasuku Honjo (Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine, 2018) at Kyoto University, working on antibody maturation and diversification. He then extended this work in Dr. Rafael Casellas’s lab at NIAMS/NIH, studied transcription factor dynamics in primary B cells, engineered nanobody-producing mouse model (nanomouse, JAX 036538) and developed broadly neutralizing nanobodies against SARS-CoV-2. Prior to accepting his position at Georgia State University in 2023, he worked in Dr. Peter Kwong's lab at the Vaccine Research Center/NIH as a Research Fellow on anti-HIV-1 nanobody development and structure-based antibody improvement.

Research Interests
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the urgent need for rapidly deployable novel drug development technologies that are prepositioned to respond rapidly when emergent pathogens arise. My expertise in antibody and nanobody technologies can contribute to this important goal. Nanobodies are antigen-binding entities derived from the heavy chain-only antibodies of camelid animals, and they retain full antigen specificity at a very small size (13 kDa). They can penetrate tissues and recognize epitopes that are often inaccessible to conventional antibodies. Such “hidden” epitopes also have the potential to be conserved across viral strains, making nanobodies ideal antiviral drugs with great cross-reactivity to multiple viral pathogens. The long-term research goal of my lab is to establish efficient nanobody development platforms and use these platforms to produce novel biological molecules across multiple therapeutic areas, including infectious diseases and immuno-oncology. Short-term viral targets for nanobody countermeasure development includes SARS-CoV-2, Human Immunodeficiency Virus-1 (HIV-1), Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV), Human metapneumovirus (HMPV), Henipaviruses (HNV), Arenaviruses (ARV) and Hantavirus (HTNV).