my name is Rebecca Dubois i am an associate professor in the
department of biomolecular engineering at the university of california santa cruz
the overall goals of my lab are to understand the molecular mechanisms of human virus infections
and how our immune system antibodies are able to fight off infection we then use that information
to develop new vaccine antigens and antiviral therapies our first goal in vaccine development
is to investigate the atomic structures of virus antigen proteins these are the proteins on the
surface of the virus and we want to understand what they look like at the molecular level
then we want to investigate how antibodies target those proteins and block the viruses ability to
cause infection and so we use structural biology to investigate these molecular interactions
we then use that information to understand the most important parts of the virus to target
in a vaccine we use the octet platform in really three specific ways the first way is we use it
to quantitate the amount of virus antigen protein that we are generating by cell culture in the lab
this is a really quick and easy experiment to quantitate that and allows us to optimize the
production and get the most out of our cultures the second way is that we use the octet platform
to measure the binding affinities of virus antigens with antibodies understanding the
strength of that interaction and where the most potent type binding antibodies bind on the virus
really helps us to identify the points of vulnerability on the surface of the virus
and know that those are the spots that we can target with a vaccine third we're using the
octet platform to measure the levels of antibodies in blood plasma and this is a really exciting new
technique that we've developed in our lab we can use this to measure the amount of antibodies in
people that have been naturally infected with a virus or we can use it to measure the amount of
antibodies resulting from vaccination and so this really helps us with vaccine development
because we are able to optimize vaccines so they elicit as strong as or even stronger antibody
responses than natural infection and we can measure those responses with the octet platform
what we like about the octet is that it is simple to use and it is rapid in terms of the results
the results are real time so i can't help but sit there and watch my data as it comes on the screen
we have essentially eliminated eliza's from our workflow so eliza stands for
enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay and these are full-day experiments that really can have
limited dynamic range or be limited in quantitative data so the octet platform not
only enables us to accomplish our goals faster but the data is more quantitative than elisa's
in the future i see vaccine development moving much faster from concept to pre-clinical trials
and the octet really enables multiple stages of that development in my lab i'm really excited
about the generation of synthetic vaccine antigens these are antigens with sequences that do not
come from nature but maybe are a combination of different viruses and the ability to generate
these vaccine antigens that could potentially protect against multiple strains of a given virus
you