Annie Elong Ngono | Instructor, Center for Infectious Disease and Vaccine Research
La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology

Dr. Annie Elong Ngono is Research Instructor in the Center for Infectious Disease and Vaccine Research at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI). She received her Ph.D. in Immunology working on the role of autoreactive T and B cells in periphery using blood samples from patients with multiple sclerosis, an autoimmune disease. Her research focus has since broadened, to infectious diseases and mouse models in the group of Dr. Sujan Shresta. She has led key projects aimed at understanding the adaptive immune response to infection with flaviviruses, particularly dengue and Zika viruses. In particular, she developed novel mouse models of sequential infections with dengue and Zika viruses to demonstrate that the cross-reactive anti-flaviviral T cell and antibody responses have the capacity to either protect against or exacerbate clinical disease, depending on the context. Recently, Dr. Elong Ngono has extended her work to investigate the role of pre-existing immunity to human common cold coronaviruses and the interplay between antibody and T cell responses in modulating the outcome of infection with SARS-CoV-2 using various mouse models. In addition, Dr. Elong Ngono has established scientific collaborations with researchers in several endemic countries to investigate emerging virus biology, immunogenicity, and pathogenicity using patient-derived samples, while also building research capacity and viral surveillance on site