Our research is focused on developing plant-made pharmaceuticals (PMPs).

To promote global public health, our goal is to develop affordable vaccines, immunotherapeutics, and antivirals based on protein engineering and plant biotechnology.  Unlike conventional cell culture systems, plant-based protein production can be highly economical and scalable by exploiting simple natural resources, thereby facilitating the distribution of protein pharmaceuticals that are otherwise prohibitively expensive and limitedly available.  Given the resources available within UofL Medical School and close collaboration with Kentucky BioProcessing, LLC, we have the capacity to perform translational research to bring PMPs from bench to bedside.

Research Interests:

• Subunit vaccine and antiviral protein engineering

• Biopharmaceutical sciences/drug development research

• Mucosal immunology and immunotoxicology

• Protein expression in plants

For more details, see Research Projects

The lab has two locations:

Lab 2 at Mitchel Memorial Cancer Center Suite 201 in Owensboro, KY. Main activities here include protein engineering, protein expression/purification, biochemical and biophysical analyses of recombinant proteins, and cell culture-based bioassays.

442F at Clinical and Translational Research Building 4th floor in Louisville, KY. In vivo testing and immunological assays of plant-made proteins are primarily performed here.

For more details, see Contact information.