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I am a scientist with interests in life sciences and biotechnology, particularly in the field of vaccinology. I completed my undergraduate studies in Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of Cape Town, before moving to Medical School for my postgraduate training in Infectious Diseases and Immunology (honours) and subsequently Virology (M.Sc./PhD).

Upon completion of my M.Sc., I worked as a Senior Scientific Officer in the HIV vaccine group for 4 years. This project involved a team of scientists that were tasked with the testing of novel combination vaccines against HIV. My primary responsibility was the development of a platform for the production of HIV-1 glycoprotein vaccines in plants and their immunogenicity testing in animals. The rationale underlying the use of plants as an expression platform is due to their potential for cheap and scalable production.

This project formed the basis of my doctoral research which I completed in 2018. A major aspect of my PhD was the use of human folding proteins (chaperones) to boost the production levels of the HIV glycoprotein in plants. This approach appears to be broadly applicable to improving the accumulation of other viral glycoproteins in plants and is now under intensive investigation in our research group. I am a co-inventor on 2 patent applications based on this work and have several publications in progress.

My postdoctoral research builds on this work and is looking to broaden the scope of viral glycoprotein-based vaccines that are produced in plants. A major focus of my research is to improve the maturation of these recombinant glycoproteins which may not always occur optimally along the plant secretory pathway. Expression of target glycoproteins is conducted in parallel in both plants and mammalian cells to enable head-to-head biochemical and antigenic comparisons.

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Emmanuel Margolin joined the Pandemic Response CoLab community

Sep 24, 2020

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