"Influenza Evolution: A Major Challenge in Vaccine Development" by Nicholas Wu | October 8 2021
The effectiveness of the seasonal influenza vaccine is far from ideal. In this talk, Dr. Nicholas Wu will highlight the shortcomings of conventional egg-grown influenza vaccines and explain the challenge of developing a universal influenza vaccine due to the evolutionary capacity of the virus. He will also describe a high-throughput experimental approach to examine the replication fitness of many mutations in parallel.
Nicholas Wu is an assistant professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with joint appointments in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences in the Department of Biochemistry and Carle Illinois College of Medicine in the Department of Biomedical and Translational Sciences. He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Virginia and earned his doctorate from the University of California, Los Angeles. He completed his postdoctoral training at Scripps Research. The Wu lab at UIUC studies the molecular features of interaction between antibodies and viral antigens.
