Biomaterials for Raising Productive Immune Responses

Several of our projects deal with using biomaterials to elicit therapeutic or protective immune responses.  Towards each application, highly tuned and specified immune phenotypes are usually required for optimal efficacy.  Sometimes, this optimal phenotype is not yet known.  So the biomaterials we design are employed to both discover and then reliably elicit specified immune phenotypes.  Modular molecular construction facilitates this discovery and optimization process.  

Recent examples of work in this include projects aimed at infectious diseases such as antibiotic-resistant bacteria or malaria.   

We are also interested in exploiting some of the unique properties of supramolecular assemblies.  For example, their fully synthetic design and stable self-assembly make them more impervious to temperature fluctuations than many conventional vaccines, an important property for distribution to the developing world.  

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Immuno Schematic