Chemistry & Biochemistry Seminar: "Biomimetic Macromolecular Nanoplatforms: Novel Biochemical Approaches for Rapidly Emerging Viruses"

Presenter: Prof. Santimukul Santra (Department of Chemistry, Pittsburg State University)

As COVID-19 continues to be an ongoing pandemic, our lab focused to help the society by adopting unique engineering concepts and technologies for infectious diseases. Some of these include (i) applying high throughput, bioinspired nanoplatforms for tracking viral entry and fusion, (ii) chemical approaches to create novel catalytic labels for assesment of protective immunity in response to natural infection and vaccination, and (iii) designing tunable polymeric formulations with diverse functionality for vaccine delivery and management.

This presentation will introduce magnetic relaxation as a new bioanalytical tool to study membrane fusion interactions for enveloped viruses in real-time for screening antiviral therapeutics. Class I viral fusion proteins with specific examples of influenza and SARS-CoV-2 that employ diverse fusion triggering mechanisms including low pH, protease activation, receptor binding or a combination of these will be discussed. On the other hand, point-of-care test for assessing COVID-19 vaccine immunity will be included. Recent results on unique catalytic labels and its’ integration in lateral flow assay (LFA) technology that allows visualization of test results with naked eye will be highlighted in this presentation. Finally, a quick look at our smart design for dendritic biomaterials and responsive nanoplatforms for delivery, with an ultimate goal of creating efficient vaccine formulations. Such vaccine delivery platforms, offering unique features of carrying large payloads and importantly, protecting mRNA, nuclei acids deliverables from nucleases.

Free