Dr Lauren Eyssen
Lauren has a PhD in biochemistry from the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa where she was focussed on developing diagnostics for animal African trypanosomiasis by targeting several proteases using both antibodies and single chain variable fragments (scFvs). During her first first postdoc in South Africa, she was using scFvs to investigate ways to negate the need for the culture of live, human infective, trypanosomal parasites which are utilised in current diagnostics. In Poland, she undertook her second postdoc investigating the activity of neutrophil proteases in children with neutropenia using activity based probes. Her third and final postdoc was at the Franklin where she was focussed on the development of the nanobody discovery platform.
Lauren is now a scientist at the Franklin currently managing the day to day running of the nanobody discovery platform at the Franklin.
Nanobodies Discovery Platform
Nanobodies are single domain antibodies derived from the unique heavy chain only immunoglobulins of camels, llamas, and alpacas.
Disease X
The World Health Organisation lists Disease X (the name for a currently unknown pathogen that could cause a future epidemic) as a very serious threat to human health. To prepare for Disease X, we are building a pipeline to rapidly identify, and test nanobodies, for detecting and potentially treating future viral diseases