Deimante Lukosaityte
Deimante is a PhD student at Pirbright Institute, registered with The University of Edinburgh. Her research project supervised by Prof Munir Iqbal aims to develop vaccine platform inducing passive immunity in chickens. Deimante will exploit viral vectors such as herpesvirus of turkeys (HVT) that will express neutralizing antibodies in vaccinated birds; such platform is an especially attractive model due to ability to induce early life rapid protection in chicks as well as could be used for prophylaxis. Her project will develop recombinant HVT vaccines that express single chain monoclonal antibodies targeting avian influenza H5 and H9. Deimante is also interested in generating universal vaccine; therefore she will be looking into capacity of viral vectors to undertake multiple single chain neutralizing antibodies against multiple subtypes of H5, H7, H9 avian influenza viruses. Prior to the studentship she completed MSc degree at Imperial College London where she was analysing atypical interferon regulated genes. Her BSc was completed at the University of Essex where she studied prevalence of Acanthamoeba within the environment.