Associate Professor Andreas Kupz, Ph.D.
Senior Fellow, October 2024 to March 2025
James Cook University
- Associate Professor and NHMRC Investigator at the Australian Institute of Tropical Health and Medicine at James Cook University in Cairns, Australia
- Performed postdoctoral training at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology
- Studied biology at Humboldt-University in Berlin and obtained a PhD in microbiology & immunology from the University of Melbourne
Fellow project: "Advancing vaccine technology to combat bacterial pathogens"
My research focuses on the development and evaluation of vaccines for infectious diseases, with particular focus on tuberculosis, the leading bacterial infectious cause of death globally. The fellowship project is part of a broader research program that is supported by multiple global funding agencies and my host institution, James Cook University, Australia. Together with my collaborators in Greifswald we aim to continue the pre-clinical evaluation of a live-attenuated vaccine candidate for tuberculosis in a small animal model. Furthermore, the project will assess the biochemical and biophysical properties of a self-assembling and self-adjuvanting peptide-based tuberculosis vaccine candidate and explore the translatability of peptide- and mRNA-based vaccines to other bacterial diseases. The knowledge gained from this project will help advance the goal of finding an effective vaccine against tuberculosis and strengthen collaborative links on vaccine technologies between institutions in Greifswald and Australia.