SynBio.Oxford, the Oxford University Synthetic Biology Society, invites to another online seminar that couldn’t be more topical.

Prof Mark Howarth will explain the technology underlying the SpyTag/SpyCatcher peptide superglue and present different areas in synthetic biology where this can be applied. He will also talk about challenges in vaccine development, and how SpyBiotech is planning to contribute to vaccination against Covid-19 and future pandemic threats.

Mark did graduate work in molecular immunology at Oxford University Institute of Molecular Medicine and Southampton University Cancer Sciences. In his postdoctoral work at MIT he developed tools in chemical biology, advanced microscopy and nanotechnology to understand receptor trafficking. He has been a PI at Oxford since 2007. In 2017 he was awarded the Royal Society of Chemistry Norman Heatley Prize for chemical biology. He is a co-founder of SpyBiotech, which is now running clinical trials for a Covid-19 vaccine.