Biotech Values

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HTBX 2.46 - When Natasa Strbo was investigating perforins for her Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Rijeka in Croatia, she received an unexpected invitation to work with Eckhard Podack, the scientist who had discovered the family of antibacterial proteins that helps our immune systems kill infectious invaders.

But when Strbo arrived in Podack’s lab at the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine in January 2000 to complete her dissertation, she learned that he had other ideas. The legendary chairman of the Department of Immunology and Microbiology, who died in 2015, was looking for help advancing the live-cell vaccine he developed for lung cancer using heat shock protein gp96, a member of the family of proteins that our cells naturally produce in response to stress. It was a subject she knew little about.

Today, Strbo is a world expert on gp96, a “fascinating little molecule” that has put her in the worldwide hunt for a vaccine against COVID-19, the novel coronavirus that has infected 10 million people around the world and killed more than a half million of them. Backed by Heat Biologics—the company Podack co-founded in 2008 to use the gp96 vaccine platform to stimulate immune responses against a variety of cancers, viral infections, and other diseases—Strbo’s unique COVID-19 vaccine is on track to begin manufacturing for preclinical-testing next month.

https://news.miami.edu/stories/2020/07/researchers-gear-up-for-preclinical-testing-of-coronavirus-vaccine.html