Inorganic functional immunomodulators targeting Th-17 immune response for vaccines and cell therapies

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The project aims to deliver a new class of inorganic materials that profoundly modulate immune responses. These are based on an inorganic material platform to improve the quality and efficacy of current and next generation vaccines and cell therapies targeting infectious diseases and cancers.The functional material explored allows precise control of the physicochemical properties of the particles by applying engineering principles during the synthesis step, enabling tailor-made compounds specifically designed to elicit the optimum immune response for the respective disease targets. The immune response of these compounds proved to be predictable based purely on the properties of the functional materials enabling rapid in-silico screening of best candidates, accelerating development timelines for a broad range of modalities and probability of success in clinical studies.In this project we will apply engineering principles to immunobiological systems by rationally design inorganic immunomodulators and screen them for their immunological response in relevant assays. It will specifically target the special types of immunity needed for defence against many bacterial and fungal pathogens, and which are particularly important for defence at mucosal sites where most of these pathogens infect (e.g. lungs, gut and genital tract).