Reports across media has pointed out the study’s effectiveness is substantially lower than the pfizer vaccine, Brent finds out from expert Professor Stephen Turner if we should have concerns on which vaccine is better for the coronavirus, and should we avoid them?
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Who is Professor Stephen Turner
Prof Turner studies factors that regulate virus-specific T cell recruitment and differentiation after infection. His lab utilizes a multidisplinary approach to examine how differences in T cell receptor recognition of peptide-MHC antigens impacts development and differentiation of virus-specific T cell responses. He is also interested in factors that shape the transcriptional and epigenetic signatures that define virus-specific T cell differentiation from the naive state into both the effector and memory populations. He utilizes a combination of ChIP-Seq, RNA-Seq, bioinformatics and systems biology, inducible shRNA knockdown, retroviral bone-marrow transduction, gene-deficient mouse models and 3C approaches for determining promoter-enhancer interactions. Such analysis will tell us if the molecular mechanisms regulating transcriptional control of T cell effector function are unique and/or shared among key effector genes. This will lead to identification of key immune correlates of protective immunity and will contribute to improvement of immunotherapies for both infectious and autoimmune disease.