Improving Effectiveness of the Influenza Vaccine
Henry Wan Lab
Research Interests
Dr. Wan’s long-term career goals are to understand how zoonotic pathogens (especially influenza A viruses) emerge and re-emerge at the animal-human interface and to improve the effectiveness of the influenza vaccines in disease prevention and control by developing and applying systems biology-based translational approaches. Translational systems biology is an integrated, multi-scale, evidence-based approach that combines laboratory, clinical and computational methods with an explicit goal of developing effective means of control of biological processes for improving human health and rapid clinical application.
PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR
Henry Wan
Curators’ Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Professor of Pathobiology and Integrative Biomedical Sciences
Professor of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology
phone(573) 882-8943
email wanx@missouri.edu
Henry Wan is a Curators’ Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, professor of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology, and professor of Pathobiology and Integrative Biomedical Sciences at the University of Missouri.
LAB MEMBERS
In the news
Aug. 22, 2019
#IAmScience Henry Wan
Henry Wan | Photo by Roger Meissen, Bond LSC By Mariah Cox | Bond LSC Every year we all tend to pay a visit to the doctor to get ahead of cold and flu season. Nothing could be worse than being in the midst of a hectic time at work or school and being out of commission. Many don’t think twice about the annual flu shot, it just becomes a part of their autumnal routine. But for Henry Wan, a new primary investigator in the Bond Life Sciences Center, a significant portion of his life revolves around understanding…
Feb. 12, 2024
Bond LSC researchers create model to shorten flu vaccine development and bolster efficiency
Cheng Gao built the MAIVeSS model to accurately predict optimal flu vaccine viruses when provided with a virus strain. | Photo by Sarah Gassel, Bond LSC By Sarah Gassel | Bond LSC Flu vaccines could be getting a booster of their own with the help of machine learning. MAIVeSS — the Machine-learning Assisted Influenza VaccinE Strain Selection framework — has the potential to reduce the time it takes to choose flu virus strains used in annual vaccines from months to mere days. Researchers at the University of Missouri partnered with Mississippi…
March 10, 2021
Higher Viral Load May Lead to Less Severe Symptoms
Cynthia Tang and Henry Wan | photos by Becca Wolf and Roger Meissen, Bond LSC By Becca Wolf | Bond LSC You would think that the less sick you are, the less contagious you are. That’s just logic. However, science isn’t always logical. Especially with Covid-19. Henry Wan, principal investigator at Bond Life Sciences Center, recently found that when a person has mild symptoms of Covid-19 they have a higher amount of viral shedding. He also found that people with a higher amount of virus on their positive swab test are less likely to be hospitalized than those…