Prof Maria Elena Botazzi
Room: Cairns D003-063, TSV 39.252A
Associate Dean, National School of Tropical Medicine, Professor of Pediatrics, Section of Pediatric Tropical Medicine, Baylor College of Medicine; Deputy Director Sabin Vaccine Institute Product Development Partnership, Houston, Texas, USA
The neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) are the most common infections of the poorest people in the world and who live on less than US$2 per day. They include ancient scourges such as hookworm and other soil-transmitted helminth infections, Chagas disease, amoebiasis, schistosomiasis, leishmaniasis, and dengue. Together, these NTDs produce a burden of disease that in certain regions even exceeds HIV/AIDS, while simultaneously trapping “bottom billion” in poverty through their deleterious effects on child physical and intellectual development, pregnancy outcome, and worker productivity.
The high prevalence and incidence of the major NTDs afford an opportunity for joint cooperation and alliances to address the highest prevalence conditions and accelerate the development of alternative control tools such as vaccines for the major NTDs. One of the major hurdles in the critical path for the development and testing of novel and translational discoveries is overcoming the “valley of death”, or product development gap for taking a bench discovery to the point where it shows a clear path to the clinic. A perspective of a sustainable model to accelerate translation of discoveries into new vaccines and applied by the Sabin Vaccine Institute Product Development Partnership (Sabin PDP) founded to develop recombinant protein vaccines targeting NTDs will be presented.
Prof Maria Botazzi Bio
Prof Botazzi has a broad background in molecular and cellular biology and tropical medicine, with specific training and expertise in key vaccine research areas for this application. Specifically, she has extensive experience in the product development activities for recombinant biologics including projects to express, scale up the process development, analytical and biochemical assay development and quality control for recombinant proteins derived from hookworm, schistosome, and other neglected and emerging infectious agents that are suitable vaccine targets. Prof Botazzi currently serves as the Deputy Director of the Sabin Product Development Partnership and has served for the last 15 years as the Program Director for Product Development of multiple recombinant vaccine programs that have advanced successfully from the bench into the clinic in the US and overseas. Prof Botazzi has ample expertise in managing complex programs and training technical scientific units for the process development of recombinant vaccines using the yeast and bacteria expression systems.
As PI or co-PI on several previous non-federal and NIH-funded grants, Prof Botazzi laid the groundwork for the proposed research by developing feasibility processes for recombinant protein expression as well as how to scale them up. In addition, she successfully administered the projects (e.g. staffing, research protections, budget), collaborated with other researchers, and produced multiple peer-reviewed publications from each project. As a result of these previous experiences, She is aware of the importance of frequent communication among project members and of constructing a realistic research plan, timeline, and budget. The current application builds logically on her prior work and prior product development and manufacturing collaborations.
