La Jolla immunologist Haoyang Li has a new title and a nearly $4.5 million federal grant to back it up.

The La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI) named Li a Research Assistant Professor and he is opening his own lab at the institute, the organization announced Sunday, Sept. 27. The Li Lab will engineer antibodies, peptides, proteins and live cells to boost or regulate immunity, targeting cancer, autoimmune disease and viral threats.

Li calls himself a "human immunity engineer" rather than a biologist, virologist or immunologist. His core tool is cryo-electron microscopy, an imaging technique that captures high-resolution pictures of how viruses and antibodies interact. Those images serve as blueprints for designing next-generation therapeutic antibodies and vaccines.

The lab's anchor funding is a Stephen I. Katz Early Stage Investigator Research Project Grant from the National Institutes of Health's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). The five-year grant, announced March 5, will fund Li's investigation of a molecule called interleukin-1 receptor 8 (IL-1R8), which helps regulate inflammation. The goal: develop antibody treatments that can boost immune responses against tumors and infections while reducing chronic inflammation in autoimmune disease.

"We want to design the next-generation antibodies to tune the functions of IL-1R8 in different pathological conditions," Li said in the March announcement. "We just need the blueprint to do that."

Li first joined LJI as a postdoctoral researcher in the Saphire Lab, led by LJI President and CEO Erica Ollmann Saphire. There he used cryo-electron microscopy to study viral proteins and therapeutic antibodies. He and LJI colleagues published a study in Science Translational Medicine revealing how antibodies bind to the deadly Lassa virus.

His path to immunology started during the 2003 SARS-CoV-1 epidemic in China. As a high school student, Li was quarantined at home for four months. He read a book called How Pathogenic Viruses Work? That sparked a career.

Li's mentors at LJI include Saphire, Chief Scientific Officer Shane Crotty and Professor Emeritus Michael Croft, along with UC San Diego professors Hal M. Hoffman and Dennis A. Carson. The NIAID described his IL-1R8 project as "conceptually and technically innovative."

The Li Lab is now open at LJI's La Jolla campus. No specific hiring timeline or public events have been announced.