Alex Ramirez PhD
About Alex
"An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field." - Niels Bohr (Danish Physicist and Nobel Laureate).
Alex is a trained biochemist with expertise in immunology and vaccinology. His research interests lie in directing immune responses to specific targets. He obtained a 2:1 BSc from Imperial College London and went on to join Professor Tracy Hussell's lab as a grad student. During his PhD studies he was the recipient of the Dorothy Hodgkin's Postgraduate Award aimed at attracting the "best research students from around the world". As a grad student he worked at both the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology and later at the National Heart and Lung Institute in the UK. His doctoral studies consisted of finding an experimental link between autoimmunity and infection using the CIA arthritis model combined with multiple pathogenic infections. During this time he also worked on utilising LT toxin based molecules to improve the outcome of disease during viral respiratory infections. Alex had a placement at the Novartis Vaccines Institute for Global Health, where he worked with the Meningitis B vaccine team led by Dr. Rino Rappuoli . Eventually the vaccine would be successfully launched as Bexsero® in 2013.
After completing his PhD, Alex was appointed Executive Partner at Pixel People LLP. Perhaps his best known accomplishment during his time at this small company was the creation of the educational app "IMMUNO". The game aims to 'engage children and adults alike, while educating about in immunology'.
In 2011, Alex was asked to join the University of Massachusetts Medical School to carry out research as a Postdoctoral Associate within the Infectious Disease department. His project, in the laboratory of Asst. Prof. Anuja Mathew, focused on finding the reasons behind low vaccine efficiency in the aged and corrective immuno-modulation strategies using the IM TIV influenza mouse model.
In 2014 he was recruited by an exciting London-based biotech to act as Head of Immunology and later promoted to Head of Discovery. iQur hopes to develop a novel universal influenza vaccine using their patented "tandem core" new-gen vaccine technology. The project was comissioned as a FP7 European Union initiative, and the results were presented at the EU headquarters in Brussels as featured here.