New Faculty Appointment: The BIIE Welcomes Prof. Emma Slack
The Botnar Institute of Immune Engineering (BIIE) proudly welcomes Prof. Emma Slack to its growing faculty. Prof. Slack holds a joint appointment as the Barclay-Williams Professor of Molecular Immunology at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology within the University of Oxford.
Prior to joining the BIIE, Prof. Slack served as a Full Professor of Mucosal Immunology in the Department of Health Sciences at ETH Zurich. She began her career investigating pattern recognition receptor signaling in the innate immune system and has progressively pursued the fundamental question of how the immune system recognizes and controls diverse pathogens,a challenge particularly complex in the microbial ecosystems of our mucosal surfaces.
Some of her early work revealed the major mechanism of action of bacteria-targeting antibodies in the gut, leading to discoveries that have opened new avenues for intervention. Building on these fundamental insights, her research group has developed innovative vaccine interventions capable of selectively protecting against and eliminating disease-causing bacteria. Her work uniquely bridges fundamental topics in immunology, microbiology, and physiology with synthetic biology and biophysics and has transformed our understanding of mucosal immunity.
At the BIIE, Prof. Slack's group will focus on developing oral vaccine compositions to prevent a broad range of serious bacterial and viral infections. These approaches are particularly relevant for BIIE's mission, as oral vaccines offer ease of application and storage, excellent safety profiles, and are especially suitable for low-resource environments and vulnerable populations such as pregnant women and infants. Her translational vision has already led to the creation of Baxiva, a spin-off company developing vaccines targeting urinary tract infections.
Q&A with Prof. Slack
What inspired your journey from studying pattern recognition receptors to focusing on the complex world of mucosal immunity?
Pattern recognition has mainly been studied in cells from the blood, spleen or bone marrow. By the time you have enough bacteria in your blood, spleen or bone marrow to trigger these receptors, you are already seriously ill. I really wanted to know how we recognise and deal with bacterial infections during the earliest stages, which is typically colonization of one of our mucosal surfaces. If we can tackle infections at that stage, then we should be able to make effective vaccines.
Your work has revealed fundamental mechanisms of gut antibody function. How do these discoveries translate into practical interventions for childhood diseases?
Bacterial infections during the first two years of life are much more likely to be fatal than in older children and adults. For example neonatal sepsis has an average mortality rate of 17% internationally, but this can be much higher in low resource settings. Developing effective prophylaxis, for example via maternal vaccination or via antibody-like molecules that can be supplemented into milk could greatly reduce the incidence of infections and save lives. Similar patterns exist for bacterial diarrheal diseases in infants.
What unique advantages do oral vaccines offer for improving pediatric health in resource-limited settings?
The major advantage of oral vaccines is that you don’t need needles or highly trained staff to administer them. Most oral vaccines we work with are also inactivated so very stable at room temperature and easy to distribute. On top of that, oral vaccines induce immune responses in the location where they are needed to tackle gastrointestinal infections.
How do you envision your mucosal immunology expertise contributing to BIIE's mission of transforming immune engineering for global child health?
At the BIIE, we will build on our major research programme generating both biotechnological advances and fundamental knowledge needed to make oral vaccines effective across the whole population and to increase the range of responses we can induce. Our vision is to develop active and passive oral vaccines that drive local extinction of major antibiotics-resistant bacterial strains, such as the ST131 extraintestinal pathogenic E. colis. Such interventions would be particularly powerful due to their ability both to protect individuals, but also to generate herd immunity by removing infectious reservoirs.