Dr. Aneesh Thakur, Principal Investigator, Laboratory of Vaccine Engineering, and Immunology (LVEI) is seeking an outstanding Postdoctoral Fellow focusing on Influenza vaccine development to join his team.

H5N1, Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI), also known as bird flu, is a serious disease and requires rapid response because it is highly contagious and often fatal to chickens. Most efforts to develop vaccines against H5N1 infection in chickens have relied on traditional vaccine platforms that do not induce a strong immune response and provide only limited immunity due to rapid virus mutation and rearrangement. Messenger RNA is a promising vaccine technology to develop novel H5N1 vaccines in chicken. Moreover, aerosol delivery of mRNA can generate protective immunity in the lungs against HPAI. However, little is known about how to design safe mRNA vaccines for administration in the respiratory tract and how to achieve potent airway mucosal immunity. The purpose of this project is to develop and test an inhalable mRNA vaccine against H5N1 infection in chicken. The project will combine approaches in drug delivery, immunology, virology, and in vivo infection models to achieve the objectives.