During my doctoral research, I have investigated the host-viral interaction and developed effective antivirals and a vaccine candidate against Japanese encephalitis and also contributed in area of COVID-19 research. After the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 and its global impact, rapid development of effective vaccines and their emergency use authorization resulted in significant reduction in the number of cases. The development of effective vaccine relies on the generation of humoral and cellular immunity via generating longed lived memory cells.
My current research interests are to investigate the mechanism of T memory cell generation and novel ways to produce significant pool of antigen-specific memory cells required to provide protection against reinfection and vaccination. One of the important criteria to design effective vaccines are the selection of the antigenic epitopes. Since there are several variants/serotypes/genotypes of the emerging and reemerging viruses, the antigenic epitopes (B, HTL and CTL epitopes) can be selected based on the consensus sequences of the immunogenic structural or non-structural proteins. These antigenic epitopes can be linked with linkers to generate the final stable vaccine construct. This vaccine candidate can be conjugated to a Toll-like receptor 7/8 agonist to activate antigen presenting cells (APCs) and induces both humoral and cellular immune responses. Moreover, self-assembly nanoparticles can be further used to entrap or link the peptides leading to significant uptake and activation of APCs. The vaccine candidate can be administered in the animal models in any suitable forms including mRNA, protein subunit, adenoviral vector-based vaccines to deciphers its efficacy against the range of variants/serotypes/genotypes.
I am interested in understanding role of T memory cell exhaustion and deciphering the novel ways to modulate the generation of antigen specific T memory cell involving central memory T (TCM) cells, effector memory T (TEM) cells and tissue-resident memory T (TRM) cells upon vaccination.
Publications
Swatantra Kumar, PhD - Google Scholar