Design of efficacious vaccines against respiratory viruses

by Prof. Raghavan Varadarajan (MBU-IISc)

Wednesday 7 Oct 2026, 16:00 → 18:00 Asia/Kolkata

AG66

Viral acute lower respiratory infections directly or indirectly cause over a million deaths annually, with a substantially higher toll in pandemic years. A large fraction of these deaths occur in infants and the elderly in low and middle income countries. For most major respiratory viruses, vaccines either do not exist, are unaffordable, or have to be stored at ultralow temperatures. Enhancing vaccine stability is important for both vaccine efficacy and deployment. There have been recent, transformative advances in the area of protein structure prediction. However, even with state-of-the-art AI driven approaches, reliable prediction of stabilizing mutations for complex, viral surface proteins remains challenging.  We have developed general methodology to rapidly isolate stabilized protein variants, including for metastable viral surface proteins. Our efforts to apply this to design and clinically test novel vaccines against important respiratory and other viruses will be discussed. An influenza vaccine formulation that we developed was shown to be safe in a human Australian Phase 1 trial, and clinical development in India is ongoing.