Lachlan Deimel
I am a second year departmental DPhil student funded on the Clarendon Programme. My main research interests relate to vaccine development against glycans and glycoproteins with specific focus on cancer and HIV-1 vaccine development.
There are several immune tolerance mechanisms that prevent the raising of self-glycan-reactive antibodies, including negative selection and immunogenetic constraints, resulting in a naïve B repertoire with a ‘glycan blindspot’. This blindspot is exploited by both pathogens (e.g. HIV-1 and IAV) and cancer that deliberately acquire glycomodifications to shield sensitive functional epitopes from B cell recognition. Consequently, I devise vaccination strategies utilising synthetic protein chemistry to selectively break glycan immune tolerance and direct these responses towards a pathology-relevant target. We employ emerging antibody discovery technologies, serological analyses, flow cytometry, biochemical analyses and structural biology to evaluate vaccination outcomes. I also maintain several secondary projects, including how chemical stabilisation of SARS-CoV-2 Spike-based immunogens affects immunogenicity and functional antibody outcomes (e.g. neutralisation efficacy).