Prof Teresa Lambe OBE
The Lambe Group for Emerging Pathogens
The Oxford Vaccine Group and the Jenner Institute Laboratories
Dept of Paediatrics, University of Oxford

Assoc Prof Lambe will share her research insights into the immune response to SARS-CoV-2 and its vaccine. Her research group is part of the Covid-19 vaccine trial in the UK and has co-designed the vaccine and led the development and testing of the immune response after vaccination.

Prof Lambe’s research investigates the establishment of protective immune responses following vaccination and the formation of adaptive immune memory. She is particularly interested in delineating the immune response post vaccination and also post natural infection to help develop vaccines and define correlates of protection. At the University of Oxford, her group uses platform technologies to develop vaccines against emerging and re-emerging pathogens. The group is currently developing vaccines against a number of outbreak pathogens including Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever virus, Lassa virus, Nipah virus, Influenza, Ebolavirus and coronaviruses.

Visual: John Cairns/University of Oxford

Prof Benjamin Murrell
Department of Microbiology, Tumor and Cell Biology
Karolinska Institutet

Prof Murrell will speak about his work on the H2020 CoroNAb project, studying antibodies and isolating nanobodies against SARS-CoV-2.

Prof Murrell's previous research interests surrounded the evolution of the HIV envelope protein, and antibodies against it. Recently, he has applied this expertise to SARS-CoV-2 and its variants. Together with colleagues, he has identified nanobodies from immunized alpacas that may be potential SARS-CoV-2 therapeutics, and has conducted preclinical immunization studies attempting to boost responses to SARS-CoV-2 variants. This work is part of the CoroNAb consortium research project, funded under Horizon2020 as part of the EU’s emergency funding call for COVID-19.

Visual: Karolinska Institutet

Prof Sai Reddy
Laboratory for Systems and Synthetic Immunology
Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering, ETH Zurich
And Vice Director BRCCH

Prof Reddy shares his recent work on developing a simultaneous diagnostic and genomic surveillance method for SARS-CoV-2 based on targeted deep sequencing. He will also present new data from his group related to identifying variants of SARS-CoV-2 using a novel method called deep mutational learning. 

Prof Reddy’s research is focused on the emerging field of systems and synthetic immunology, with an aim towards developing technologies relevant to immunotherapy and biotechnology. He has developed a number of methods in systems immunology to improve our understanding of adaptive immunity, with a particular focus on immune repertoire sequencing. Recently, he founded two spin-off companies, deepCDR Biologics and Engimmune Therapeutics, which are both based on technologies developed in his research group on engineering antibodies or T cells.