Dan Stinchcomb lecture was titled “Development of Vaccines for Mosquito Borne Tropical Diseases”. He talked about different viruses and how they can spread rapidly and how human density favors the emergence of new viral pathogens. He mentioned Dengue fever, West Nile Virus, Chikungunya disease, Zika Virus and how they worked to develop effective vaccines for these diseases. He went through the distribution of the disseases and the cause and effect and how we could work to prevent them, mostly talking about vaccines. He gave a lot of information on the development of vaccines, trial methods, safety, etc. he also talked about IDRI and the promise of RNA vaccines.
I thought it was a really good seminar, although some parts of his lecture was very technical, i did understand most of what he was talking about, and i think it is a very important topic. This connects closely to the virology proportion of our class, although his lecture went more in depth than what we did in class. Is RNA vaccines the future? Can they (in the future) replace the other vaccines that we have today?