We all had a fun evening making dumplings to celebrate Thanksgiving 2024. We were glad to welcome back recent rotation student Ana plus extra friends from the Baker and Cornell Communities. Thanks for hosting Serena :)

Serena did a great job showcasing our canine antibody project in New Jersey in October. The Immunity and Microbial Pathogenesis Graduate Program meets annually to bring together scientists from Weill, MSK and Cornell Ithaca.

We have been excited to receive multiple shipments of really valuable human clinical samples recently. These have arrived from collaborators in Vietnam, Ghana and Zambia. We are using these samples to measure rotavirus antibodies using several different assays. We are immensely grateful to all the study participants and study co-coordinators.

To celebrate new graduate students choosing their lab after a stressful year of rotations, the BMCB program at Cornell has started a great new tradition - the coating ceremony. Here each advisor helps their new trainee put on a ceremonial lab coat. Congratulations Serena, we are glad you chose us!

Cornell DVM student Jess Palmeri (lower row right) spent her summer working in the lab as part of the Cornell Veterinary Investigator Program. She made great strides establishing a canine FcRn assay, and presented her work at the Veterinary Scholars Symposium in Minnesota.

The first Caddy lab group conference attendance! We all traveled to the American Society of Virology conference in Columbus, Ohio from June 24-28th. Sarah C enjoyed chairing the rotavirus workshop, Sarah W gave a fantastic first ever conference talk, Tawny presented a lovely poster on LCMV, and baby Nora had fun at the amazing conference daycare. Thank you ASV!

It has been a pleasure to welcome two scientists from the Centre for Infectious Disease Research in Zambia to our lab in June; Michelo Simuyandi who is Lead Scientist of the Enteric Disease and Vaccine Research Unit and post-doc Kalo Musukuma. They have been performing neutralization assays on a valuable set of clinical samples collected from their rotavirus vaccine clinical trial in Lusaka.

Congratulations to Agnes Yang on completing her honors thesis and graduating from Cornell! Agnes has been with us almost from the start and we know she is going to be great in her new research tech position in Arizona. Finally, we wish her all the best with her medical school applications.

First year graduate student Sarah Woodyear ran her first London Marathon on April 21st in 3 hours 25 mins! This is a really incredible time, we are so proud!

Congratulations to vet student Lotta Truyen for becoming the recipient of the Michael J Day Scholarship 2023. This is generously awarded by the World Small Animal Veterinary Association (WSAVA) to one talented student each year. This scholarship is supporting Lotta’s work in our lab studying canine maternal antibodies.

We are thrilled to announce the arrival of our most special lab member yet! Here is baby Nora on a very important day - getting her first rotavirus vaccine. She has been an excellent addition to lab meetings so far and we are looking forward to her mum returning to the lab next month.

It was a pleasure to welcome two new lab members at the start of the year - postdoc Steven Moran and rotating graduate student Serena Teh. Some lab members needed convincing that karaoke was a good idea for a lab social, but we can confirm that it was great!

We celebrated the end of 2023 with a meal at Moosewood, Ithaca. We learnt that Christmas Crackers are British thing not routinely stocked in upstate NY shops, but Sarah Woodyear made sure we had suitable alternative headwear :)

Merry Christmas everyone!

The Immunology and Microbial Pathogenesis (IMP) Graduate Program at Weill Cornell hosted their annual scientific retreat at Crystal Springs, New Jersey.

This was attended by a group from the department of Microbiology and Immunology at Cornell University (pictured), including Caddy Lab Sarah Woodyear who presented her poster titled ‘Overcoming maternal antibody inhibition of neonatal B cells’.

How do non-neutralizing antibodies work against viruses? Read our new review to find out!

Congratulations to Ana Pimenta, our summer student who has won the Veterinary Virology Undergraduate Prize at the Brazilian Virology Congress. We are very proud of you!

Members of the lab attended the two day symposium at the Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine, Ithaca. Here Dr Caddy presented a wonderful talk in the innate and adaptive immunity session, titled ‘the maternal antibody paradox’.

We are excited to share that we have been awarded a grant from the Riney Canine Health Centre to study maternal antibodies in dogs. We look forward to collaborating with the Theriogenology Team at the Cornell University Hospital for Animals to get work underway.

Tawny hosted an excellent 4th of July celebration for the lab :)

We’ve now been at the Baker Institute for a whole year! It has been such a pleasure seeing the lab grow. We now have an awesome team of talented scientists, lots of shiny new equipment and several projects well underway. We are excited to see what our second year will bring!

Ana Alice Pimenta, a vet student from Brazil, joined our lab for the summer as part of the Leadership Program for Vet Students. Please read more about her experiences here.

Sarah is honored to be a recipient of the 2023 Affinito-Stewart Grant. This has been generously awarded by the Presidents Council of Cornell Women. The Caddy Lab will use this grant to study maternal antibodies in children that have been vaccinated against rotavirus.

Celebrated with a tea party in the sunshine. Good luck to Dianne on the rest of her grad school journey!

The Caddy lab enjoyed a round of cider and a meal at picturesque South Hill Cider to celebrate the end of the semester and each other’s accomplishments. While the evening started a bit windy and cold eventually the evening stilled and we felt summer start to creep into the valley. Our efforts against the spring chill were rewarded when the sun came out and offered a beautiful view as the sun set over the lake before the evening ended with some live music and (maybe) dancing!

For our Intercampus grant we spend a day visiting our collaborators in NYC in the Permar Lab. The campus-to-campus bus took us directly from Cornell Vet School to Weill Cornell Medical School. Although it took about 5 hours, it was very simple! We enjoyed connecting in person with post-doc Caitlin Williams and lab tech Mackensie Gross (pictured above). Lots more rotavirus experiments are now planned…

Our high-content imaging multimode reader is here! This is a Cytation 7 by Aligent/Biotek. We will use this for fluorescence imaging of cells in 96 well plates for our virus and antibody studies. This machine can also read ELISAs and ELISpots, count cells, image slides….

It was a pleasure to finish our first six months with a lab Christmas lunch. We are enjoying being a team of four (plus honorary children!), with two more recruits starting in 2023.

We have now mastered most standard assays in the lab using our new equipment. We are also excited to have placed an order for an all-singing-all-dancing high content imaging instrument - its arrival will be heralded soon.

The Caddy Lab was recently awarded an Intercampus Seed Grant to start an official collaboration with Professor Sallie Permar and her team at Weill Cornell.

Vaccines have been developed to prevent rotavirus disease in children, but they do not work well in low-middle income countries. It is likely that maternal antibodies are contributing to poor vaccine responses. Human rotavirus doesn’t replicate well in mice, so at present it isn’t straightforward to study this immunity to human rotavirus in a small animal model.

We aim to use ways to alter the genes of both mice and rotaviruses in order to improve virus replication in a mouse model. We will then be able to study how infant immunity to rotavirus is affected by maternal antibodies. Using mouse models to understand why rotavirus vaccines work poorly in countries where they are most needed, will provide a foundation to develop better vaccines in the future.

This week we turned on our incubators and biosafety cabinets, unpacked our microscope, and defrosted our first cells. It is surprising how much of an achievement this feels after months of planning!

These cells will be used to start growing up stocks of viruses we will work with in the lab. Teething problems are expected, but we hope we can now start gathering momentum. Please look out for future introductions to our three new lab members who will start to arrive shortly!

The Caddy Lab opened its doors on the 5th of July 2022. As you can see we have plenty of space and plenty of boxes to open!

The next few weeks will be spent buying and organizing everything we need in order to start doing experiments. Our tissue culture hoods, incubators and centrifuges have all arrived and are ready to be installed. No sign of any pipettes yet, but these have been on order for over a month and should be on their way soon!

The support from all the team here at the Baker Institute has been phenomenal so far, and the Caddy Lab is eager to get started. We look forward to posting photos of our first experiments soon.