Virologist, biologist
Alex Sigal is a South Africa–based virologist at the Africa Health Research Institute in Durban, South Africa, the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His work concentrates on emerging viruses. His laboratory was the first to isolate the live Omicron BA sub variant and the live Beta variant of SARS-CoV-2 first detected in South Africa. Sigal’s laboratory was also the first to report results on the ability of the Omicron variant to escape antibody neutralization in individuals who had two doses of the Pfizer BNT162b2 vaccine as well as from previous infections, with results also suggesting that vaccination combined with a booster or previous infection can offer protection from symptomatic infection with Omicron.
Education.
Sigal earned his bachelor's degree from the University of Toronto, Master's degree from the Weizmann Institute of Science, and PhD in Systems Biology from the Weizmann Institute of Science under the supervision of Uri Alon.
Research interests.
Sigal joined the laboratory of David Baltimore in 2007 at Caltech for his postdoctoral work where he worked on problems related to HIV virology. He joined the Africa Health Research Institute in 2013 in Durban, South Africa as a Max Planck Research Group Leader affiliated with the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin. While there, he broadened his research to the study of drug-resistant tuberculosis and in 2020 to the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
Sigal's current core research is directed at understanding virus evolution, long term-persistence and its consequences for transmission and immune escape, and long term effects, with particular interest in the effects of co-infections such as HIV and TB, antibody neutralization, and cell-to-cell spread of viruses. In particular, Sigal's work has investigated how heavily mutated viruses evolve in immune-compromised individuals.
References.
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