| dbo:abstract
|
- Anne Searls De Groot is a physician, immunologist and entrepreneur. She is the co-founder and CEO/CSO of the immunoinformatics company EpiVax. Prior to EpiVax, she was a professor at Brown University, where she established the TB/HIV Research Lab. The laboratory attracted a range of intelligent and creative Brown University undergraduate and graduate students (Bill Jesdale, Gabriel Meister, Tamar Renaud, Jessica Stevens, and many others) who worked with De Groot on projects ranging from improving healthcare for inmates living in correctional facilities in the United States, improving access to care in West Africa, and developing cutting edge tools for analyzing protein sequences and designing vaccines. While at Brown University, De Groot worked with Gabriel Meister and Bill Jesdale to develop the EpiMer and EpiMatrix epitope mapping tools. These were among the first motif-based and matrix-based, fully automated T cell epitope mapping tools. The team applied these tools to HIV vaccine design, and were soon travelling to HIV Vaccine conferences as a group to demonstrate how the tools could be used to help design vaccines that would be effective against a range of HIV strains (see GAIA Vaccine, and GAIA Vaccine Foundation). Additional tools were developed that automated genome sequence analysis for highly conserved, immunogenic epitopes, starting from any protein sequence. Having successfully collaborated with a range of institutions, including University of Pennsylvania, Hopkins University, Harvard University, and the CDC, De Groot, working with then-consultant Bill Martin, decided to establish a commercial company to make these tools available to a wider audience. EpiVax was founded with an initial grant from the Slater Biotechnology Foundation (in 1998). During the 1998-2008 period, EpiVax became a well known for innovative, collaborative research in computational vaccinology and immunoinformatics. De Groot was invited to establish a new Institute at the University of Rhode Island in 2008. She directed the Institute for Immunology and Informatics at the University of Rhode Island, from 2009 to 2019, and is currently Senior Scientist and Professor at the University of Georgia Center for Vaccines and Immunology. and the . She is actively involved in graduate teaching at the Center for Vaccines and Immunology and guides the scientific research program in her laboratory at EpiVax. (en)
|
| rdfs:comment
|
- Anne Searls De Groot is a physician, immunologist and entrepreneur. She is the co-founder and CEO/CSO of the immunoinformatics company EpiVax. Prior to EpiVax, she was a professor at Brown University, where she established the TB/HIV Research Lab. The laboratory attracted a range of intelligent and creative Brown University undergraduate and graduate students (Bill Jesdale, Gabriel Meister, Tamar Renaud, Jessica Stevens, and many others) who worked with De Groot on projects ranging from improving healthcare for inmates living in correctional facilities in the United States, improving access to care in West Africa, and developing cutting edge tools for analyzing protein sequences and designing vaccines. (en)
|
