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Protein Immuno-engineering against infection outbreaks by variant viruses

【LIFE SCIENCE】 Kuroda Unit

  • Overview

    As experienced in the current coronavirus pandemic, viral genomes mutate frequently, eventually producing variants that can escape from vaccines and drugs developed against the original strain. A rapid adaptation of therapeutics to make them effective against the new variant of concern are thus of utmost importance to public health issues.

    We plan to use corona virus and influenza virus as a model to explore such possibilities by combining protein engineering, biotechnology, molecular biology and synthetic chemistry approaches. A key concept being that instead of using a whole virus as the target molecule, we use a tiny protein fragment that is essential for the transfection and the spread of the virus (Fig.1). Using a protein fragment as a template for searching therapies against novel variants will not only sharply accelerate the search (Fig.2), but will make the search less costly and, eventually, environmentally friendly to develop, test, and produce.

Team Head

International Researcher(s)

Members

Kaori Tsukakoshi (Institute of Engineering / Assistant Professor)
Hitoshi Takemae (Center for Infectious Disease Epidemiology and Prevention Research / Senior Assistant Professor)
Mami Ohba (Center for Infectious Disease Epidemiology and Prevention Research / Associate Professor)

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