“My SPARK project will investigate the blood of individuals who have likely survived multiple exposures to Ebola and Marburg viruses throughout their lifetimes, as their blood may contain crucial insights for developing broad-spectrum viral treatments and enhance our understanding of these unpredictable outbreaks.”
2025 Tullie and Rickey Families Spark Awards Winner
Kelly Shaffer
Does the blood of Ebola and Marburg virus survivors hold secrets to life-saving therapeutics?
Funded: February 2025
Funded By: The generosity of LJI Board Director Barbara Donnell, Bill Passey and Maria Silva, and various donors
SPARK Notes
Ebola and Marburg viruses are both filoviruses, and they are among the deadliest pathogens in the world. There are six types of these filoviruses that infect humans, but we only have a treatment against one of these. Adding to the problem, it can be impossible to distinguish between the different types of viral infections in time to get treatment, especially in resource-poor areas. Kelly Shaffer’s SPARK project could change everything. From the blood of one Ebola virus survivor, Shaffer isolated an antibody capable of neutralizing all of these six filoviruses. This one potent antibody may work as a “pan-filovirus” treatment to save lives in regions where these viruses overlap.
What was the goal of your SPARK project?
For decades, scientists have searched for human antibodies that can fight multiple types of filoviruses at once. I was dedicated to looking where others had not. I worked with an international group of collaborators to study people from remote villages in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) who have lived their entire lives in areas where filoviruses, such as Ebola virus and Marburg virus, circulate. I hypothesized that by studying individuals who had survived viral exposure, I might find the broadly neutralizing antibodies that had eluded the field. A single antibody treatment that works against all these viruses would transform outbreak response.
SPARK Project Results
I found the “silver bullet.” From the blood of a survivor of the 1995 Ebola outbreak in Kikwit, I isolated over 500 immune cells that recognize all five deadly filoviruses. This is unprecedented in the 26-year history of this field. Among these, I discovered an antibody called Filo-076 that neutralizes not just all of the Ebola viruses, but also both Marburg viruses very potently. This is the first human antibody ever shown to neutralize across both branches of this viral family. I also found the first human antibody that binds all five viruses at an unprecedented strength (called Filo-327), and another antibody that potently neutralizes all Ebola-type viruses (called Filo-312).
“Your support of SPARK enabled a breakthrough that scientists sought for nearly three decades. I proposed to find antibodies that could be a single, off-the-shelf therapeutic against all known filoviruses, and I delivered. These extraordinary individuals held the key, and their blood has revealed the ‘silver bullet’ we all hoped to find.”
What’s next for this project?
Antibody Filo-076 has already caught the attention of the U.S. Department of Defense for further therapeutic development, and I think there are additional neutralizing antibodies in these donors’ samples. I was very fortunate to win additional funding through the SPARK Progress Pitch, which has funded a second year of research for my project. Ultimately, the most promising antibodies from my research will be advanced to testing with authentic viruses in BSL-4 (Biosafety Level 4) facilities and, if successful, to animal efficacy studies. This work has the potential to provide emergency therapy to locals, medical workers, and travelers, allowing a single treatment to be used against the known and yet-to-emerge filoviruses.
What’s next for Kelly?
I am actively pursuing this project as the central focus of my doctoral dissertation. Earlier this year, I received the 2026 BioLegend Graduate Fellowship in Immunology to examine exactly how these antibodies from my SPARK research bind to and neutralize filoviruses. This structural research will hopefully reveal which parts of these viruses the human immune system can target to achieve broad protection, providing a roadmap for developing universal vaccines that train the body to fight many filoviruses at once.
2025 Progress Pitch Competition and Winner Progress
Humans are extraordinarily complex, with roughly 20,000 genes inside our bodies acting as the building blocks of life. Ebola and Marburg viruses, members of the filovirus family, contain only seven genes. Yet viruses like Ebola and Marburg can overwhelm the human immune system in a matter of days or weeks. Without treatment, these hemorrhagic fever viruses can be fatal in up to 90 percent of cases, causing not only severe flu-like illness but also catastrophic internal and external bleeding. Understanding how something so seemingly simple can cause such devastating casualties has become the driving force behind Kelly Shaffer’s SPARK research.
In October 2025, that year’s SPARK cohort was invited to participate in the SPARK Progress Pitch Competition, an opportunity designed to help promising projects maintain momentum and bridge potential funding gaps. During the competition, researchers presented the progress made during their initial grant period and outlined the next phase of their work to a panel of SPARK stakeholders and LJI Board Members. Shaffer was selected as the 2025 Progress Pitch winner and awarded an additional $30,000 to further advance her infectious disease research.
The funding from this award arrived at a pivotal moment in her project. Shaffer had recently conducted a highly successful run on LJI’s Beacon Optofluidic System, a specialized platform for identifying antibody-producing immune cells generously funded by Michael and Ellise Coit.
Going into the experiment, she hoped to identify five to ten promising antibody-secreting cells. Instead, she identified more than 500 potential pan-filovirus antibody-producing cells.
The additional SPARK funding allowed her to continue analyzing these rare antibodies and generate the proof-of-concept data needed to compete for larger federal grants. In collaboration with Professor, President and CEO Erica Ollmann Saphire, Ph.D., MBA, Shaffer helped develop a proposal for a National Institutes of Health (NIH) R21 grant—an exploratory funding mechanism that supports high-risk, high-impact research projects over two years with up to $275,000 in funding. The proposal received a score of 10, the highest possible rating and an exceptionally rare outcome for this type of application.
“I don’t think we would have received the R21 grant without that initial SPARK funding,” Shaffer said.
Through these multiple funding sources, she aims to distinguish antibody-based treatments capable of working against the entire family of Ebola and Marburg viruses.
Her research has taken her from the laboratory to remote regions of the DRC, where she has helped coordinate fieldwork, transport precious samples, and train Congolese researchers to perform key laboratory assays. By combining international collaboration with advanced antibody discovery technologies at LJI, Shaffer and her collaborators are working to uncover rare immune responses that could help shape the next generation of filovirus therapeutics.
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