mRNA: A new era in vaccines and therapeutics

Join international guests from Moderna, Dr Kate Jeffrey and Dr Andrea Carfi to discuss "mRNA: a new era in vaccines and therapeutics". 

This is a free seminar. All welcome. 

Hybrid event

• In-person attendance is at the Queensland Bioscience Precinct Auditorium (Building 80). Access via Chancellor's Place.
• You may also like to join via Zoom

Meet the speakers:

Dr Kate Jeffrey is the Vice President of Immune Therapeutics within Research and Early Development (RED) at Moderna in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In this role, Kate is responsible for management of all discovery and drug development for autoimmunity, inflammation, hematology and epigenetics using Moderna’s proprietary mRNA technology. Prior to joining Moderna, Kate had a highly successful academic career at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital where she was an Associate Professor of Medicine, a John Lawrence Research Scholar, a faculty member of Harvard Immunology, Harvard Virology, MIT Microbiome Centre for Microbiome Informatics and Therapeutics and a member of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. Kate performed her Ph.D. in Immunology at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney, Australia and her postdoctoral research at The Rockefeller University in New York City under a CJ Martin National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) fellowship. Kate is the recipient of multiple awards for her work in immunology and epigenetics including the Rockefeller Women in Science Award, Kenneth Rainin Foundation Innovator Award, Claflin Distinguished Scholar Award and MGH Research Scholar Award. Kate was also the co-founder of the Imagine Science Film Festival in New York and gave a TEDx talk.

Dr Andrea Carfi is the CSO for Infectious Disease at Moderna. Andrea joined Moderna in 2017 as Head of Antigen Design and Selection and Project Leader. Since January 2019 he has led the Infectious Disease Research team focusing on preclinical and early development work. Andrea has almost 20 years of experience in drug discovery and vaccine development at Moderna, GSK, Novartis Vaccines and IRBM / Merck. Over the years he has held roles of increasing responsibility with a focus on structural biology, antigen design, small molecule antivirals discovery and vaccines development.During his time at Moderna Andrea has led the early development of the CMV mRNA vaccine, now in a Phase 3 efficacy study, and has built a large portfolio of mRNA vaccines against Infectious Disease targets now in clinical studies. Most recently Andrea was leading the preclinical and early development of Spikevax, the Moderna mRNA vaccine against COVID-19. Andrea did his PhD in Biophysics at the Université Joseph Fourier in Grenoble, France. He also trained as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratories of Prof. Stephen Harrison and Prof. Don Wiley at Children’s Hospital, Boston. Andrea is co-author of more than 100 publication in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

Hosted by Professor Mark Blaskovich (Director of Translation, Institute for Molecular Bioscience).