Dr Isabel Elliott, PhD

Postdoctoral Researcher at University of Southampton

Speaker

Dr Isabel Elliott is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Division of Structural Biology at the University of Oxford. She is currently working in Professor Thomas Bowden’s lab on structural studies of antibody-viral glycoprotein interactions and vaccine design using X-ray crystallography and cryo-EM. Isabel earned her BSc in Biochemistry from the University of Exeter, during which she undertook a research placement year in biopharmaceutical development at GSK R&D. She recently completed her PhD in Chemistry at the University of Southampton in the Antibody & Vaccine Group at the Centre for Cancer Immunology, under the supervison of Professors Mark Cragg, Jonathan Essex and Ivo Tews. Her PhD research focussed on engineering TNFR-targeting immunostimulatory antibodies for enhanced receptor agonism as cancer therapeutics. In this work, she integrated cellular immunology with structural biology and computational chemistry to investigate how structure-guided disulfide engineering could be used to modify antibody conformation and rigidity, and tune immunostimulatory antibody agonistic activity. Isabel is a co-inventor on a patent application filed for this work.