Blog Posts

Research assistant professor Ami Patel has spent her career committed to using novel engineering approaches to fight harmful infectious diseases. Her work focuses on developing next generation vaccines and immunotherapies using DNA as part of her toolset.  Dr. Patel has been at the forefront of the Wistar Vaccine and Immunotherapy Center’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. She is a major scientific contributor to the preclinical studies that enabled one of the first vaccine candidates developed to rapidly move into clinical trials. Dr. Patel walks us through her work.

In the middle of the pandemic, Wistar graduate student Kevin Alicea-Torres is living a busy and exciting life, preparing to defend his thesis and graduate with a Ph.D. in cell and molecular biology from the University of Pennsylvania at the end of the month and starting a prestigious fellowship in science communications in the early summer.

In mere weeks, philanthropic support of Wistar’s Coronavirus Discovery Fund has exceeded $1.6M in new funding thanks to an extraordinary response from individuals, foundations, and corporate sponsors. As our scientists focused their research to advance vaccines, drugs, and diagnostics targeting the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, Wistar donors moved with the same speed, committing to put our discovery science into action in a variety of important ways. This pace of investment in research now underway at Wistar will allow us to accelerate and potentiate progress against SARS-CoV-2 and future viral threats the world may confront.

Dr. Ertl is a global leader in Wistar’s Vaccine & Immunotherapy Center whose research focuses on preventing rabies, HBV, HIV, HPV, influenza, and other deadly viruses using innovative patented technologies. In response to the global COVID-19 emergency, the Ertl lab quickly applied some of these technologies to the development of a vaccine. She illustrates her approach and its advantages below.

The Pennsylvania Cancer Alliance, a coalition of the state’s leading cancer research institutions, meets every year in early May for a lobbying initiative to engage legislators and spotlight the impact the Commonwealth Universal Research Enhancement (CURE) Program has on cancer research taking place across the Commonwealth. CURE funding was established in 1998 with money the state received from the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement.