KATHOLIEKE UNIVERSITEIT LEUVEN (KU Leuven)
Leuven, Belgium
The KU Leuven is Belgium's largest university [ranked 42nd globally in 2023 in the Times Higher Education ranking] and leads the Reuters list of Europe's most innovative universities since 2016. The MVVD (Molecular Vaccinology & Vaccine Discovery) team of Prof. Kai Dallmeier (at the Rega Institute, KU Leuven) focuses on the development of vaccines for neglected and emerging pathogens such as Zika virus (Kum et al. Nature PJ Vaccines 2018), Ebola (Lemmens et al., NPJ Vaccines, 2023) and SARS-CoV-2 (Sanchez-Felipe et al. Nature 2020; Sharma et al. Nature Comms. 2022), using the live-attenuated yellow fever YF17D vaccine as vector. For that purpose, the team developed during the past 12 years a rich toolbox with direct application to this project. The scope of research spans from molecular understanding of the viruses targeted (Janssen et al. RNA Biology 2020), over modelling of viral pathogenesis in experimental animals (Boudewijns et al. Nat. Comms. 2020; Abdelnabi et al. EBioMedicine 2021; Ji et al. Emerging Infect Microbes 2021; Ji et al. EBioMedicine 2022) to the use of synthetic biology.
Project Team
Project tasks
Work Package 1: Influence of virus architecture on protective epitope exposure and antigen intracellular trafficking
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Task 1.4. Lead: Compare protection efficacy of different forms of YF17D vaccines in small animal models
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Work Package 2: Identification of host factors that predict and influence the vaccine response to YF17D
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Task 2.3. Quantification and serological characterisation of the vaccine response to YF17D in the collected cohorts
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Task 2.4. Investigate host factors that predict and influence the vaccine response to YF17D
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Task 2.5. Serologically characterise cohorts exposed to WNV and Usutu Virus
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Task 2.6. Lead: Test factors hypothesised to influence the response to flaviviruses based on the analysed cohort data in animal models of flavivirus infection