Blair DeBuysscher

My main interests focus on understanding the interplay between host and pathogen in the context of vaccination and infection. This work spans pathology, molecular biology, virology, and immunology. In recent years, I have focused more closely on the adaptive immune response, specifically in-depth characterization of the B cell response. I leverage antigen-specific B cell enrichment methods which allows for identification and isolation of B cells specific for proteins of subunit vaccines. This method allows us to identify cell that have responded to vaccination and track how this population changes over time. This system is a great way to evaluate the health and robustness of a B cell population as well as determine how changes made to a vaccine, for example the use of different adjuvants, affect this population. By combining this technique with single-cell sorting and sequencing, we can pair flow-based phenotype data with individual BCR sequences, gaining novel insight into the clonality and phenotype of antigen-specific B cells post-vaccination. Specifically, by following the vaccine antigen-specific B cell response over time, we aim to better understand the effects of novel adjuvants on the downstream adaptive response. By comparing adjuvanted, we aim to create an adjuvant fingerprint that can then be used to choose the best adjuvant for a future vaccine. Current work focuses on Toll Like Receptor (TLR) agonists as adjuvants. These molecules act as immunomodulators binding either TLR 4, 7 or 8 and can easily be formulated (alone or in combination) with antigen to create an effective subunit vaccine. Current studies include vaccines targeting influenza, Pseudomonas, Covid and fentanyl.