MI2025 – Sylvie Alonso

Title:
A versatile and powerful dendritic cell-targeting platform to deliver vaccine antigen candidates against infectious diseases

Abstract:
We have been exploiting a dendritic cell (DC) targeting delivery platform to deliver vaccine antigen candidates and induce robust and sustained immune responses. The technology consists of a chimeric anti-Clec9A monoclonal antibody (mAb) where the vaccine antigen candidate is genetically fused at each of the heavy chains. The mAb construct targets the C-type lectin receptor Clec9A that is expressed on type I conventional DC (cDC1) subset. I will present very promising pre-clinical data supporting the use of the Clec9A-targeting vaccine platform to develop a pan-sarbecovirus nasal booster vaccine candidate. With an equivalent DC subset in humans (DC141+ DC), translation of the Clec9A targeting vaccine strategy to human is a realistic and exciting avenue.

Biography:
Dr Alonso obtained her PhD degree in Microbiology and Molecular Biology from the University Claude Bernard Lyon I (France). She then continued her post-doctoral training at Pasteur Institut de Lille (France) where she developed bacterial vaccine delivery systems, followed by another 2 years at Cornell University (NY, USA) where she studied the molecular pathogenesis in tuberculosis. In 2004, she was awarded the Lee Kuan Yew post-doctoral Fellowship and joined the Department of Microbiology at NUS, Singapore. She was recruited as an Assistant Professor in 2007 and promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2013. For the past 15 years, Dr Alonso’s research team at NUS has studied the host-pathogen interactions during viral infections, including Hand, Foot and Mouth Disease (HFMD) and Dengue. She has also pursued her long-time interest in vaccine development against viral diseases.