NIH Director’s Wednesday Afternoon Lecture Series

NOMINATE A SPEAKER
Submit a nomination for the 2025–2026 season
by December 31, 2024, at
https://oir.nih.gov/wals/wednesday-afternoon-lecture-series-nominations

Sign up for notices about each lecture.

Mechanisms of Phage-Derived Protein Antibiotic

William M. (Bil) Clemons, Jr., Ph.D.
California Institute of Technology, Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering

NIH Director’s Lecture

As antimicrobial resistance continues to expand, new ideas are required to address the growing threat. Phages, viruses of bacteria, offer many lessons that can be leveraged as opportunities to combat bacteria. In this lecture, Prof. Clemons will describe how some phages have developed simple, protein-based mechanisms for breaking through the bacterial cell wall and killing their host. These protein antibiotics can work independent of the phage, yet for years their mechanisms have remained mysterious. The mechanisms for several of these will be revealed.

Structure-Based Vaccine Antigen Design

Jason McLellan, Ph.D.
The University of Texas at Austin, Department of Molecular Biology

Rolla E. Dyer Lecture

Structure-based vaccine design aims to exploit knowledge of an antigen's architecture to stabilize it in a vulnerable conformation and elicit protective antibodies against one or more epitopes. Viral fusion proteins are excellent targets for structure-based vaccine design because they fold into several distinct conformations required to promote viral entry and membrane fusion. During this talk, the general principles of structure-based vaccine design and their application to the development of vaccine antigens for licensed RSV and COVID-19 vaccines will be discussed.

This page was last updated on Tuesday, November 12, 2024