**PhD Bioscience Opportunity – ADDomer: Synthetic Multiepitope Virus-Like Particle Platform for Next-Generation Vaccines**

Infectious diseases plague and decimate populations. Among the means at our disposal to counter this threat, vaccination has proven to be exceptionally powerful. Nonetheless, severe threats continue to challenge human health, notably from viruses that have adapted and emerged as new diseases or pathogenic strains. Ideally, a vaccine will be safe, non-replicative, efficient, and tunable, and easily produced at industrial scale. Recombinant virus-like particles (VLPs) can be ideal candidates to address these requirements and therefore hold enormous promise in the vaccine field. In this project, we will use ADDomer, a versatile, designer antigen-presenting VLP platform we developed. ADDomer is exceptionally stable, highly soluble and safe. This innovative ADDomer scaffold is uniquely suited to display hundreds of pathogenic epitopes and protein domains. Here, we will combine world-leading expertise in synthetic biology, in vitro selection/evolution and biodesign to achieve a step-change in the potency of our ADDomer technology. We are joined in our effort by our industrial partner, Imophoron Ltd, an award-winning start-up we founded to commercialize the technology. Building on this powerful synergy, we will utilize a range of biochemical, biophysical, structural, chemical and engineering approaches to design, create, characterize and roll-out highly effective next-generation ADDomer-based therapeutics to combat human disease.