Dan Stinchcomb’s seminar was about his work with vaccines and vaccine companies. He has done work with many for- and non-profit organizations to research vaccines for popular diseases, including the current company he is working for, IDRI. Stinchcomb focuses his lecture on the details of working with tropical mosquito spread viruses and working on vaccines for these popular diseases effecting thousands of people. He talks about the details of developing vaccines for Dengue fever, West Nile virus, Chikungunya Disease, and Zika virus, and discuses his research working with the diseases and their genomes, and trying to increase immunogenicity to fight the diseases. Stinchcomb talks about the work necessary to take a vaccine from research, to testing, and then to production, and goes into detail about the steps that are necessary to take in each phase of the vaccine production process.
Dan Stinchcomb starts his lecture asking about why tropical mosquito transmitted diseases could be relevant to people in Alaska, and I believe that the information he shared with us very relevant because of our large mosquito population and we should always be aware of the risks. Since our weather is changing here in the arctic being knowledgeable of any new diseases that could make there way up here is going to become more important. All of the diseases he referenced in his talk are well known, and infect so many people every year, the work being done to combat this epidemic needs to be known and supported. In class and lab we have been talking about antibiotic susceptibility and resistance, and how one may be able to attack a disease or virus to make it susceptible to antibiotics. Dan Stinchcomb gave us a real life example of how somebody can research and take steps to fighting a disease.
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