Question

Using the virus: Herpes Simplex 1 and the Fungi: Cryptococcosis

You just finished your postdoc at Pitt where you performed research aimed at developing improved vaccine adjuvants and you are now looking for jobs. A biotech start-up company invites you for an interview and asks you to pitch them an idea for a vaccine as part of your interview presentation. To do some initial groundwork, you pick one pathogen from each major category (bacteria, virus, fungi, parasite) and build preliminary pitches for each pathogen. You then select the best candidate for your full length pitch. You “decide” to share with me your preliminary pitches for feedback. The biotech company did provide one guideline for you: they do not want to compete with existing vaccine strategies, so they are not interested in any pathogens with ongoing or recently completed (since 2015) phase 2 or 3 clinical trials. They are not worried about competing with phase I projects because they will have your expertise.

Items that you decide should be included in your pitches are:

1) mortality/morbidity/DALY stats and economic burden data as appropriate to justify targeting the pathogen

2) the type of vaccine you will make (live attenuated, subunit, killed, etc.) and why

3) what type of immune response will be needed and which, if any, virulence factors the vaccine will target

4) which animal model you will use for preclinical vaccine testing

5) any special considerations that should be accounted for such as the targeted population, production, shipping and distribution, funding (private/government), and/or marketing

Answer 1

Herpes simplex virus

HSV : around the world , 2/3 rd people have been affceted by the virus and the virus has high mortality since it creates some other health problems other than the infection

2 . I prefer RNA vaccine since it is highly targeting and also response produced in short span of time

3. targeting RNA molecules through antisense RNA technology or RNase will be the immune response

4 . I would use mouse and monkey models since it has more similarity to the human infection