Atiqul is a Post-Doctoral Fellow under Leo Poon for the Novel Vaccine Platforms For Influenza project.
His background
After graduating with a PhD degree from the Laboratory of Laboratory Animal Science and Medicine, Department of Applied Veterinary Science, Graduate School of Veterinary Medicine, Hokkaido University, Japan, Atiqul has completed his postdoctoral training in different top-notch organizations including the Kyoto University (Immunology and Genomic Medicine) and Chinese University of Hong Kong (HK HOPE-Virology).
On top of committing full time on medical research for over ten years, he has also published 8 articles in the field of infectious diseases, genetics and molecular biology in reputable journals such as PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, Infection Genetics and Evolution, Nature Protocol and Allergy journals since 2014.
He was also attached as a visiting scholar in the Laboratory of RNA biofunction, Institute for Genomic Medicine, Graduate School of Medicine, Hokkaido University, Japan. Department of Molecular Life Science, Division of Basic Medical Science and Molecular Medicine, School of Medicine, Tokai University, Japan and Department of Biomedicine, Aarhus University, Denmark.
His research interest
Speaking of his research interest, Atiqul is committed to studying influenza and zoonotic diseases, immunology, genetics, as well as laboratory animal models.
Following the one health concept, his long-term research goal is to contribute to the protection against infectious pathogens that pose a significant burden on global human health including influenza and SARS-CoV2.
Using influenza as an example, according to Atiqul, “It is crucial to understand how influenza strains emerge and infect, causing diseases in animals and humans. Many of these strains are the source of all the major influenza pandemics so far in the world’s history, and they continue to cause illness in humans nowadays. Influenza can drift and shift over birds and animals, meaning that it could emerge with rearranged surface proteins and create different strains of the virus.” Hence, understanding such knowledge allows researchers to design the next generation of new influenza vaccines, which would be the key to control future influenza pandemics.
Working at C2i
Currently, he is a post-doctoral fellow in C2i’s Program 2 - Novel Vaccine Platforms for Influenza, under Professor Leo Poon. His research mainly focussed on the establishment of the next generation and universal vaccines for respiratory viral infectious diseases, such as influenza and COVID-19 using small laboratory animal models.
At this stage, he is generating different vaccine candidates to test in small animal models. Additionally, he is also interested in studying the role of immune cells and the antibody responses of different vaccine candidates.