Young Investigator Award attributed to Sofia Carvalho

19.10.2015

Sofia Carvalho, a PhD student from iBET’s Animal Cell Technology Unit received last week the “Young Investigator Award” at the 21st Biennial Meeting of the International Society for Molecular Recognition, Affinity 2015.

Affinity 2015, which was held in Puerto Vallarta - Mexico, is a meeting with a long tradition where experts from academia and industry meet to exchange knowledge in the fields of affinity technology and molecular recognition and their applications for health and disease, bioprocessing and biosensing.

The awarded oral presentation described part of her PhD research work on a click-chemistry approach for fluorescently tagging Influenza VLPs without affecting particle size, charge and biological activity.

Influenza VLPs are currently being produced at iBET using Baculovirus and as part of the EDUFLUVAC european project. The developed platform allows the on-line/at-line monitoring of the Influenza VLPs purification process and the discrimination and separation between VLPs and baculovirus, the major impurity of the process. This new approach - which was for the first time applied to virus and/or VLPs - is an important and valuable tool to monitor and optimize downstream processing of virus related biopharmaceuticals.

The work was developed in collaboration with the Physical Biochemistry of Drugs & Targets and Chemical Biology & Pharmaceutical Biotechnology Laboratories, from IMM - FMUL.