Dr. Seema Mishra, Assistant Professor at Department of Biochemistry, School of Life Sciences, University of Hyderabad presented her work on SARS-CoV-2 vaccine design as a SciTalk at the prestigious virtual live Keystone eSymposia entitled “Antibodies and vaccines as drugs for Covid19” held from Jan 13th-14th, 2021. https://virtual.keystonesymposia.org/ks/live/706/page/6516/8038
This conference with a small set of participants (total 323 participants) is centered around privileged experts at the top of their fields, as was evident from the list of invited speakers. Prominent among these speakers who talked about their work in this conference are frontrunners in vaccine development: Dr. Andrea Carfi, Moderna; Prof. Sarah Gilbert, University of Oxford; Trevor R. Smith, Inovio; Dr. Alexander Muik, BioNTech Pfizer; Liise-anne Pirofski, MD, Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Montefiore Medical Center and Dr. Davide Corti, Humabs BioMed SA, to name a few. Journal editors from Cell Press, Journal of Experimental Medicine, EMBO press held 1:1 meeting and it was heartening to be able to speak and talk openly. The major part of the questions to the speakers centered around the mRNA and DNA-based vaccines, their efficacy and their delivery systems, and whether there is a possibility of integration of these vaccine constructs into the human DNA. It was a highly rewarding and memorable experience getting to know the data on immunogenicity, efficacy and safety from the vaccine developers themselves. The discussion is still ongoing through discussion forum among the participants.
The SciTalk by Dr. Seema Mishra can be accessed at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1k58AJisMoPgCOQcMWga067pfsSvnxXo_/view?usp=sharing