The Founders lab is a year-long program that gives its students an opportunity to participate in a unique team-based, experiential Barrett honors thesis project to design and apply marketing and sales strategies, as well as business and financial models to start up and launch a new business. This honors thesis project focuses on increasing the rate of vaccination outcomes in a country where people are increasingly busy (less time) and unwilling to get a needle through a new business venture that provides a service that brings vaccinations straight to businesses, making them available for their employees. Through our work with the Founders Lab, our team was able to create this pitch deck.

Moraxella catarrhalis is a gram negative commensal bacteria that is a primary cause of otitis media in infants and severe exacerbations of COPD in adults. M. catarrhalis treatment has become increasingly difficult and expensive over the past half-century due to the emergence of beta-lactamase producing strains. There are currently no vaccines available to protect against infections. In this paper, we propose a transcriptomics-based approach for identifying potential vaccine targets. Additionally, a novel method was used to create bacterial vaccine polypeptides composed of sequence conserved peptides secreted through the outer membrane. Polypeptides were tested for immunogenicity and protective capacity in mice. We show that relative abundance of outer membrane proteins does not correlate with immunogenicity. We also show promising results for polypeptide protection in a mouse pulmonary clearance model.

In this study, we investigated the inactivation of wild-type vMyx-GFP (MYXV) using different methods. Assays were performed in vitro to test the following inactivation methods: heat, longwave UV only, longwave UV with psoralen (P + LWUV), and psoralen (P) only. In vitro assays demonstrated that the psoralen alone treatment did not cause any inactivation. These results showed that effective inactivation using psoralen was likely reliant on subsequent UV irradiation, creating a synergistic effect. Additionally, the UV and P + LWUV treatment demonstrated inactivation of MYXV, although by different mechanisms, as the UV-only treated virus demonstrated background infection, while P + LWUV treated virus did not. In mice, P + LWUV and UV treatment of MYXV demonstrated to be effective inactivation methods and likely preserved the antigenic epitopes of MYXV, allowing for the production of neutralizing antibodies in mice. More research is recommended on the heat treatment of MYXV as neutralizing antibodies were not observed, possibly due to the treatment denaturing antigenic epitopes or needing more booster injections to reach the threshold antibody concentration for protection. Furthermore, we demonstrated that the intraperitoneal (IP) injection of inactivated MYXV was superior to the subcutaneous injection in eliciting a strong immune response. The increased neutralizing antibodies observed after IP injection could be due to the advantage that the IP route has of reaching lymphoid tissue faster.