Student: Lyle Lash
Mentor: Henry Wang
Department of Chemical Engineering

Lyle Lash's thesis research aims to enable the rapid response of large-scale influenza vaccine production in the event of an emergency such as a pandemic. The current method for producing the vaccine uses chicken eggs and cannot respond quickly with large amounts of vaccine. The time required to produce the vaccine can be shortened significantly by using reverse genetics for vaccine development and mammalian cell culture for manufacturing. Facilities with a large amount of excess capacity needed to respond to a pandemic would not be economical during normal vaccine production. To overcome this, the group has proposed using a network concept for producing the vaccine in an emergency, whereby a small cell culture facility could feed existing cell culture facilities to enable a quick expansion of capacity. The technical issues with this include how to ensure that cells grow consistently and well when shipped to different facilities, how to ensure containment of the cells from the environment during transportation, and how to quickly test for sterility after shipping. If the cells grow poorly or become contaminated, the goal is to detect this early enough to prevent lost process time in culturing a bad batch of cells. To characterize the growth of the cells, Lash is developing an inoculum microarray that can test gene expression during the lag phase of culture and predict how well the cells will grow based on the expression levels of key genes. For quick sterility testing, Lash is developing rapid microbiology methods (RMMs) to detect contamination, thereby increasing the throughput of these methods to allow testing of larger samples.