Research Interests
The immune system is remarkably adept at mounting strong responses against invading microorganisms such as viruses and bacteria. At the same time, it has developed mechanisms to avoid reacting against the body's own components. One the ways that the immune system is able to distinguish between foreign invaders and self-proteins is by being able to recognize and respond to the structure of pathogens. Virus particles, for example, typically consist of one or more proteins organized into a highly repetitive, particulate structure. These sorts of structures are highly stimulatory to the immune system, resulting in the induction of strong antibody and T-cell responses.

Many viral structural proteins have the intrinsic ability to self-assemble into virus-like particles (VLPs) that closely resemble authentic virions. These VLPs mimic the structures of the viruses from which they were derived, but, because they lack a viral genome, are not infectious. VLPs make excellent vaccines for several reasons. First, they are antigenically similar to the viruses from which they were derived, meaning that they can often induce antibodies that are capable of blocking viral infection. Second, because they aren't infectious, they have excellent safety profiles. Third, their multivalent structure is capable of inducing very strong antibody responses. Two VLP-based vaccines, for Hepatitis B virus and Human Papillomavirus, are currently approved clinically, and many more VLP-based vaccines are in clinical development.