Protein engineering of vaccines for infectious disease

Seminar Details

Host: Dr. Josh Wand, Dr. Ryland Young III

Time: 4:00-5:00pm

Location: BICH Rm 108

Seminar Abstract

Vaccines are among the most remarkable achievements of biomedical science. However,
creating vaccines for several critical infectious diseases has not been possible. Our research aims to
create vaccines for such challenging targets and to devise new strategies to enable vaccine generation.
We focus on developing new protein-engineering approaches to enable “immunofocusing”, with the goal
of eliciting antibody responses against specific protective epitopes.
This lecture will introduce a new immunofocusing strategy, antigen reorientation, and its
application to creating a universal influenza virus vaccine candidate for pandemic preparedness. It will
also discuss the energetics of viral membrane fusion and its implications for vaccine design. Finally, it will
review the use of protein language models to efficiently explore fitness landscapes and guide protein
evolution.