Keasling Lab
Principal Investigator: Jay D Keasling
Institution: University of California, Berkeley (Berkeley, CA)
Primary Subfield: Immunology
Recruitment Status: Inquire for rotation/fellowship opportunities
Research Focus
Project Summary/Abstract Vaccines composed solely of antigens are often poorly immunogenic; increasing intensity and length of the induced immune response is required to achieve desirable vaccine efficacy. Adjuvants (adjuvare, to help) are biomolecules used for >100 years to enhance human immune responses to vaccine antigens. Vaccines containing adjuvants are spectacularly successful, with billions of doses administered to save millions of lives each year. Despite this success, there is only a limited set of FDA-approved adjuvants (e.g., aluminum salts, oil- in-water emulsions, CpG oligonucleotides, and an extract [aka QS-21] from the Chilean soapbark tree [Quillaja saponaria]) owing to the intrinsic toxicity of new adjuvant candidates, difficulty to source and produce them, and their poor ability to induce long-term immunogenicity. Ongoing efforts to tailor adjuvant bioactivity are limited because their structure-activity relationships and mechanisms of action are not fully understood. Herein, we propose to address this challenge by engineering adjuvants through iterative diversification of their molecular structures (synthetic biology) and deduction of their molecular-level immun…
Active NIH Awards
- 5R01AI186111-03: Iterative Microbial Production and Systems Immunology to Design QS-21 Adjuvants (2026)
- 5R01AI186111-02: Iterative Microbial Production and Systems Immunology to Design QS-21 Adjuvants (2025)
- 1R01AI186111-01: Iterative Microbial Production and Systems Immunology to Design QS-21 Adjuvants (2024)
Explore 700+ US Biology Labs on FindBioLabs.com