David Watkins, Ph.D.: A masterclass in immunology, monoclonal antibodies, and vaccine strategies for COVID-19

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
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Now, without further delay, here's today's episode.
I guess this week is Professor David Watkins. David is a professor of pathology at the George Washington University Medical School where he recently relocated from the University of Miami. There's an interesting story about his recent relocation, which we touched on at the opening part of this interview. Dr. Watkins was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and was vice chair of research in pathology at the University of Miami prior to this recent transition. His early work focused on the similarities between non-human primate simian immunodeficiency virus, SIV, and HIV. In fact, SIV is a great animal model for HIV, which is where David has spent the bulk of his career. And we touch on that quite a bit in this episode because there's a lot you can learn about what may or may not work with coronavirus. Obviously the purpose of this discussion was really to talk about coronavirus. But really what I find great about this episode is the immunology 101 discussion that I wanted to open with, and we did open with, but we went deeper than I expected we would go. I just can't say enough about that. I think if you are trying to make sense of what you are hearing about this vaccine versus that vaccine versus this test for antibodies versus that test for antibodies, if that stuff isn't crystal clear to you, you are going to want to listen to this. And even if you don't care about some of the other stuff we get into in the more nuanced science later on, I think the first part of this interview will appeal to anybody who is trying to understand immunology and doesn't know the difference between the innate system versus the adaptive system, the cellular system versus the humoral system. I think the show notes for this are going to be really helpful because again, there is just so much content here. David does just a great job explaining kind of the overall different categories of vaccines, the inactivated viruses, the attenuated viruses, et cetera. And we go into what the examples are of each of these. And then finally, David talks about what he is most excited about on this front, which is the potential for monoclonal antibodies. So I hope you enjoy this episode, and it's not going to be the last one on this topic, but this one's an important one if you want to understand anything that we go into deeper.
So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with David Watkins.
David, thank you so much for making time to sit down after you just barely had a chance to settle into Washington, DC.

**David Watkins** (3:14)
My pleasure. I'm still not fully settled in, and it's been a series of disasters that have occurred in our move here to Washington, but hopefully we will get over those things pretty quickly.

**Peter Attia** (3:28)
Yeah, I didn't know about this until recently. Would you be comfortable sharing with people the major disaster that is, I mean, if not for the fact that you were laughing, I certainly wouldn't have a smile on my face because it's so sad, but...

**David Watkins** (3:42)
Well, our freezer truck traveling from Miami to Washington, DC, with over...

**Peter Attia** (3:48)
Maybe explain to folks that you've just left the University of Miami, yeah.

**David Watkins** (3:52)
Yeah, so I've been at the University of Miami for 10 years and recently decided to move to GW Medical School.
And so I needed to transport all of my samples that I've accumulated over probably 30 years of research.
And they came up in a single truck in a variety of freezers that were plugged into the truck. And there were a couple of liquid nitrogen freezers in that truck. And in North Carolina, the truck caught fire and destroyed all of those samples. So over a hundred thousand samples were destroyed in this truck. So we're now thinking and working with the insurance company as to how to regenerate the most important samples in that truck. So yes, we had a little bit of a setback.