LSI Distinguished Speaker Seminar - Prof Christiane Berger-Schaffitzel

Prof Christiane Berger-Schaffitzel is coming to the LSI Seminar Rooms A & B at the University of Exeter on Wednesday 4 November, for a talk titled Engineering Next-Generation Antivenoms: Structural and Synthetic Biology Approaches to Snakebite Therapy. She's visiting from the University of Bristol, and the session runs from 12:00 to 13:00.

The talk is about her work on recombinant antivenoms, designed to tackle snakebite envenoming — which she describes as a neglected tropical disease. The approach she's taking combines protein engineering with in vitro display technologies, including ribosome display, to select high-affinity toxin-neutralising binders against venom antigens like phospholipases A2. Those binders are then presented as ADDomer nanoparticles.

A good chunk of her research focuses on snake venom metalloproteinases, or SVMPs, the key pathogenic components of viper venoms. To work with them, she's set up a generic SVMP production pipeline using the MultiBac insect-cell expression system, which lets her produce these proteins in a consistent way. The seminar is organised by the Living Systems Institute, so it's one of their distinguished speaker slots.

If you're into synthetic biology or the more practical side of protein engineering, it's a good one to catch. It runs from 12:00 to 13:00 on Wednesday 4 November at the LSI Seminar Rooms A & B, University of Exeter.