Harnessing Nature’s Own Nanobiotech for
Effective Subunit Vaccine Delivery
Dr. Dave Putnam, Associate Professor, School of Chemical and
Biomolecular Engineering, Cornell University
ABSTRACT
Subunit vaccines, defined as a vaccine comprised of a pathogenassociated protein, are commonly used when attenuated or killed
pathogen-based vaccines are either ineffective or too dangerous
for human use. Unfortunately, subunit vaccines also have
disadvantages. First, they can be expensive to manufacture.
Second, they can enlist immune responses that are ineffective
against the chosen pathogen. The work to be presented looks to solve each challenge. The
research team approaches the challenges of subunit vaccines through the engineering of outer
membrane vesicles derived from non-pathogenic bacteria to create effective and inexpensive
vaccines against infectious diseases for which no vaccines currently exist.
The premise of the work focuses on the expression of heterologous proteins within nonpathogenic bacteria that have been engineered to vesiculate their outer membranes into
nanoscale vesicles. The heterologous proteins are shuttled to the vesiculated vesicles to create
immunogenic constructs that enlist a pre-determined immune response in the host. Depending
upon how the constructs are engineered, strong T H 1 or T H 2-biased immune responses can be
generated from poorly antigenic heterologous proteins.
BIOGRAPHY
David Putnam joined the College of Engineering at Cornell University in 2002. Prior to joining the
engineering faculty, he was an NIH postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Chemical Engineering
at MIT in the laboratory of Professor Robert Langer. From 2000 until 2002, he held a joint
appointment MIT and as a Scientific co-Founder of a start-up company, TransForm
Pharmaceuticals, Inc., which was acquired by Johnson & Johnson in March, 2005. In 2008-2009 he
was an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at PureTech Ventrures in Boston, MA where he focused on
emerging technologies in the field of drug delivery. He is currently a member of seven Editorial
Advisory Boards including Pharmaceutical Research, Journal of Controlled Release, Analytical
Biochemistry and Experimental Biology and Medicine. His funding sources include NIH, NSF, the
Coulter Foundation and the Department of Defense. He is a Fellow of AIMBE (reserved for the top
2% of Biomedical Engineers in the United States) and the Coulter Foundation. He received his B.S.
in Pharmacy from Union University and his Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Chemistry from the University
of Utah.