Dr. John Blazeck, PhD

Our ability to fight diseases is dependent on the generation of a large repertoire of distinct antibodies, in which each antibody recognizes a different threat. Studying antibody repertoires is incredibly time consuming and expensive but has helped us to better understand how our immune systems fight diseases. My lab will seek to develop a new technological platform to greatly enhance our ability to study antibody responses. We will engineer a synthetic microbial host to create antibody repertoires from scratch, circumventing many limitations of current techniques to study immune responses. Our synthetic antibody platform will have applications in vaccine design, cancer, autoimmunity, and the study of infectious diseases.