WEHI Wednesday Seminar hosted by Dr Quentin Gouil

Kathleen Zeglinski
PhD Student – Ritchie Laboratory, Epigenetics & Development division – Healthy Development & Ageing Theme, WEHI (this is a PhD Completion seminar)
 

Developing Sequencing and Bioinformatic Workflows to Accelerate the Discovery of New Biopharmaceuticals

 

Davis Auditorium

Join via SLIDO enter code #WEHIWednesday

Including Q&A session
 

Biopharmaceuticals, such as monoclonal antibodies, mRNA vaccines and gene therapies have become an increasingly important part of the therapeutic arsenal over the last 25 years. While their unique properties allow them to treat conditions not amenable to small-molecule drugs, their biologically-derived nature requires adaptations to the traditional drug discovery pipeline. Given that most biopharmaceuticals either contain and/or are produced from nucleic acids, sequencing this DNA or RNA is important in both the discovery and quality control of new therapies. Computational pipelines are also vital to process the resulting data in a robust and efficient way. Thus, my PhD has focused on creating new sequencing and bioinformatic workflows to accelerate the development of new antibodies and lentiviral gene therapies.

In this presentation, I will outline collaborative achievements in developing a fast and cost-effective long-read sequencing workflow for hybridoma cell lines, which has been adopted both within WEHI and worldwide and facilitates the transition to reliable, recombinantly produced antibody reagents. I will also discuss how we have leveraged the latest improvements in short-read sequencing to generate and analyse tens of millions of reads from nanobody panning experiments, and empower biologists to explore their own datasets through interactive reports. Finally, I will highlight how we have used long-read sequencing of native RNA to perform quality control of lentiviral gene therapy vectors, and improved potential therapeutic efficacy through iterative design and testing.

Through the development of accessible sequencing and bioinformatic workflows for various biopharmaceutical applications, our ultimate goal is to accelerate the development of new therapeutics with data-driven discovery.

All welcome!