Current Trends in Vaccines and Vaccinology

Girja Shanker Shukla

Designation: Associate Professor

Department: Department of Surgery

Institution: University of Vermont

Country: United States

Dr. Girja Shukla is an Associate Professor in the Department of Surgery and a Full Member of Cancer Center at the University of Vermont College of Medicine, Burlington, Vermont, USA. His major interest is to develop targeted therapy against breast cancer. It involves in vitro (fresh tumors, cancer cell lines, purified cancer targets) and in vivo (animals and cancer patients) selection of tumor targeting agents using phage-displayed peptide, single chain antibody and β-lactamase loop libraries. In addition, he is also interested in generating cancer-specific full-length human antibodies, using EBV immortalization and hybridoma techniques, from B cells obtained from sentinel nodes, bone marrow aspirates and tumor tissues of cancer patients. Recently, his group has been working on the high throughput immuno-sequencing of B-cell repertoire of tumor- and vaccine-draining lymph nodes from cancer patients and relevant preclinical models. He is also actively collaborating in several clinical vaccine trials being conducted at the University of Vermont, Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, and University of Virginia.