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Project researcher: Dr Stavros Dimitriadis, Academic Specialised Foundation Programme

Stavros primarily worked on a single research project through his ASFP. He worked with the Barnes Group at the Peter Medawar Building and his project title was “Spatial antigen expression of Hepatitis C Virus Envelope-Glycoprotein (E1E2) vaccines”.

These proteins are the primary target for vaccine design due to their location, role in viral entry, and data from human infection. One issue, however, is that they have transmembrane domains with localisation signals to the endoplasmic reticulum. As such, it is unclear how much antigen produced from a vaccine candidate presents to the cell surface. Developing a technique to investigate this was the aim of Stavros’ project.

To do this, he had to learn and become comfortable with a range of molecular biology techniques: cell culture, DNA and mRNA transfection, western blot, ELISA and flow cytometry. His primary technique involved a variation of an ELISA that works directly on cells instead of proteins called 'in-cell ELISA'. He adapted this and developed two conditions to quantify antigen on the cell membrane, and antigen expressed intracellularly and on the membrane.

Stavros submitted an abstract on this work to the International HCV-Flavivirus symposium and presented a poster there in September. He also hopes to add his data to a publication from the lab on these vaccine candidates.

October 2024