In 2020, Ahlam Qerqez, with a Ph.D. in chemical engineering, 2022 and B.S. in biochemical engineering, 2016, was selected in a UT-wide search to participate in the prestigious annual Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, their seventieth since 1951, on the island of Lindau, Germany. Then, the pandemic halted everything.
The 72nd Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, the second in-person meeting since the pandemic, is dedicated to Physiology and Medicine and welcomes the #LINO70 cohort to which Ahlam was originally named.
“My selection was based on my work to develop protein therapeutics to treat human cytomegalovirus, HCMV,” Qerqez offers. Human cytomegalovirus, related to the herpes virus group, infects 50-90% of the population and remains latent until it is reactivated in individuals with a compromised immune system.
No vaccine for HCMV exists and current therapies include anti-virals and adopted T cell therapy. Anti-virals, although effective, can cause severe toxicities and can generate resistant viruses overtime. Adopted T cell therapy is also effective however is clinically cumbersome and costly. “We want to take advantage of the immune system and help it fight off this infection,” she adds, “In order to do this, we generated protein therapeutics called T cell receptors (TCRs) that naturally exist on the surface of T cells. We first made TCRs as soluble proteins (not on T cells) and then improved their ability to detect and target HCMV infected cells using protein engineering strategies such as directed evolution.”
The end goal is to bridge the gap between infected cells and immune cells in order to boost the immune response against HCMV in sick patients. Read more as published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry.
After graduation Ahlam, who received her Ph.D. from the McKetta Department of Chemical Engineering department, took a position with Denali Therapeutics to focus her skills on the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases. Her work on HCMV therapies continues in the Maynard Lab, which is led by Texas ChE Professor and Principal Investigator Jennifer Maynard.
Ahlam is one of a very select group of young scientists invited to attend. “This involved being selected from a competition at UT,” Professor Maynard mentioned, “then among all US nominees and then among all international applicants. It is a significant honor.”
ABOUT LINDAU NOBEL LAUREATE MEETINGS
The Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings, founded in 1951, aim to identify solutions to the most demanding problems of our time. They have developed into a unique international forum for scientific debate and exchange between Nobel Laureates and young scientists. Only the 650 most qualified applicants are given the opportunity to enrich and share the unique atmosphere of the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings.
