Nashville-born, North Carolina-bred Dr. James Crowe, Jr. was a curious kid. His appetite for reading was insatiable-which was evident in his weekly trips to the library, where he'd max out the number of books allowed each visit.
Like many of his peers, young Crowe was a collector, frequently on the hunt for stamps, seashells, coins and rocks; he was intrigued by the idea of possessing many of one thing.
Crowe sees parallels between his childhood obsession and his work today as director of Vanderbilt's Vaccine Center, professor of pediatrics, microbiology and immunology, and the Ann Scott Carell Chair at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
"A thing that is common among scientists, but was definitely true for me, is that I was interested in collecting things at a very early age. I had a rock collection and a seashell collection, and I collected stamps," he said. "Now, the work that I do is sort of collecting antibodies for all the viruses in the world."
OF ART AND ANTIBODIES
While Crowe collects antibodies-the Y-shaped proteins our immune system makes to fight viral and bacterial infections-the ardent collector has a thing for art too. Tribal art. Conceptual art. Photography. He collects it all. Art, Crowe believes, can lead to breakthroughs in scientific thinking.
"Collecting is about being interactive with objects because they influence you-shapes and colors and things," he said. "Pattern recognition is a big part of how science is done. So I think the art collecting practice has been very important to my work."
Art and medicine have orbited Crowe's world from the beginning. His father, a physician, and his mother, a student of art history, directly influenced his profession and his appreciation of artistic expression.
"My mother was an art history major. She went back to college when I was in high school. My father was a physician, so I was around medicine a lot and went to work with him. Ultimately, all that stuff came together for me," he said.
A CAREER-DEFINING DECISION
Nurturing a desire to practice medicine in the places it's most needed, as a senior medical student, Crowe treated patients at a rural hospital in East Africa. There, he witnessed the profound burden infectious diseases have on young children and dedicated his career to pediatric medicine.
With some guidance, Crowe realized he could help millions of kids as an immunologist-many more than he could as a pediatrician. He embraced the transition from children's doctor to vaccine developer and went to work in a pneumonia virus lab under the tutelage of the renowned late scientist Bob Chanock.
"I had mentors ask me, 'Well, what affects the health of children in Sub-Saharan Africa?' and a lot of it is infectious diseases," Crowe explained. "So, they said, 'Well, like which diseases?' and basically, I saw that diarrhea and pneumonia are the conditions that most often kill kids," Crowe added. "Then they said, 'Well, why don't you work on one of those?'"
"So," Crowe exclaimed, "I said, 'Okay, I'll work on pneumonia.' I went to the large laboratory of an accomplished senior scientist at the NIH to learn how to make vaccines that would benefit children and switched from being a children's doctor to being more of a vaccine developer."
TEAMWORK MAKES THE DREAM WORK
Led by a desire to work and teach at a top academic medical center, Crowe made his way to Vanderbilt in 1995, where he received the keys to two empty rooms, his office and what would eventually become his lab.
Today, Crowe's lab employs about 50 people; each contributes their unique expertise to creating life-saving drugs.
"We have developed technologies to study a part of the human immune system called antibodies. They're very critical molecules, and you can make billions and billions of them. They're your body's defense against infections," Crowe explained.
"We've learned how to take materials from human beings, usually blood cells, and convert the naturally occurring protective molecules from the body into drugs."
This capability proved pivotal in January 2020, when the first coronavirus case was confirmed in the United States. Using Patient One's blood sample-flown by FedEx Special Operations from Seattle to Tennessee-Crowe and his team gave themselves 60 days to find an antibody to combat COVID-19. The timeline was extremely ambitious, as developing a vaccine can easily take 10 years.
Over the coming weeks, the lab became "home" to Crowe's team. Food was routinely delivered, and after long days working, several scientists slept in the lab.
"That was stressful because it wasn't a practice exercise; it was a real-world emergency," Crowe said. "Some of our people were working 20 hours a day. We even bought sleeper beds for some of them, and they lived here in our research space basically for the first several months of the pandemic."
Crowe described how the team's flow state helped them ease through the challenges they faced.
"Instruments would break or not work, our team members would troubleshoot, and it was just an amazing cooperative effort, sort of like a symphony or a ballet," he said. "They just worked perfectly together in a flow state and got the job done. We gave the antibody sequences, the 'recipe' to make the drug, to AstraZeneca in 25 days. It was a world record for the discovery of an antibody drug."
GETTING AHEAD OF INFECTIOUS DISEASES
Now that Crowe and his team have cracked COVID-19, they've set their sights on finding antibodies to combat a slew of other infectious diseases. The team put their heads together to create a list of all the viruses that infect human beings and are working one by one to make antibodies for each.
"We have a program called AHEAD100, in which we're making antibodies to all 100 targets that threaten to cause future human epidemics. Each one of these microorganisms is different, so it's craziness!" Crowe exclaimed. "And people look at us like, 'How can you even consider that?'"
Most labs work on one virus, such as rotavirus or influenza, so targeting 100 viruses in one lab is a definite deviation from the norm.
We like it that way, although it's a little bit crazy sometimes," Crowe said.
But the craziness is intentional: Crowe believes the world is at a tipping point in history where antibodies will become very significant in combating infectious diseases, and he's excited that he and his team can contribute.
"We're trying to make [antibodies] as important or more important than vaccines and drugs because they're so powerful," Crowe said. "In the past, it was too difficult to discover them; it took too long, and historically they were expensive to produce, so they have not been used very much in infectious disease.
"We think that our work and the work of other people in labs like ours is bringing antibodies to be the third tool in the toolbox to prevent infectious disease."
By Porsha Thomas
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