Q&A with Madison Seefeld: Improving Vaccines by Hitchhiking Across the Nose’s Mucosal Lining

In the face of failing experiments and frustration, PhD student Madison Seefeld is determined to stay positive — good vibes only. When she first joined the brand-new lab of Dr. Brittany Hartwell, an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota, Seefeld and her lab mates struggled to get their experiments to work.

“I printed out a sign that said, ‘good vibes only,’ and taped it up in lab,” she said. “That served as a reminder that in lab we’re going to go off good vibes. Now reflecting back on that moment … it’s a really fun reminder that we have come a long way as a lab. We’re all very close to submitting our first publications.”

Both Seefeld and Hartwell are recipients of PhRMA Foundation Drug Delivery awards for their lab’s work developing mucosal vaccines that better protect against respiratory pathogens. The mucosal lining in the nose limits the uptake of vaccine components, so they are engineering vaccines that hitchhike on the body’s natural transport system to cross mucosal barriers. Specifically, Seefeld aims to better understand the mucosal immune response to their vaccines to determine how to enhance immune protection against mucosally transmitted pathogens

Watch this video to learn more about Seefeld and her research.

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