The symposium “Integrating chemistry, engineering and biology to create the next generation of vaccines” was held on 30th March at Queens’ College, coordinated through the Royal Society of Chemistry and EngBio IRC. This event brought together physical scientists and life scientists to engineer new approaches to vaccines that could have great impact on human and animal health. It was organised by Mark Howarth (Department of Pharmacology) and Laurence Tiley (Department of Veterinary Medicine). There were approximately 80 attendees from across the UK, with science from Taipei, Beijing, US, Denmark and France.
From the talks, Neil King of the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington explained how the recent revolution in computational de novo protein design allows creation of families of new virus-like particles for enhanced induction of both antibody and cytotoxic T cell responses. Dame Sarah Gilbert described her path to engineering the Oxford/Astra Zeneca Covid-19 vaccine and routes to create enhanced vaccine platforms for future outbreak threats. The speakers from Cambridge were Lin Wang (Department of Genetics) and Pietro Cicuta (Cavendish Laboratory).
As well as academics, the event included several innovative UK small biotech companies and insights from members of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI).
Author Information
Mark Howarth
Sheild Professor in Department of Pharmacology, University of Cambridge
Committee member, Engineering Biology Interdisciplinary Research Centre