Professor Stefan Barth
Affiliations
- Full Member, Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine
- Medical Biotechnology & Immunotherapy Research Unit
- Division of Chemical & System Biology, University of Cape Town
Key Expertise
Cancer (Prevalent), Diagnosis, Molecular Medicine, Non-communicable Disease, Immunotherapy
Main Research Focus
The major aim of our research is the use of medical biotechnology methods including antibody technologies, protein engineering & expression, to develop and evaluate knowledge-based innovative recombinant immunodiagnostics and therapeutics. The main characteristics of these novel agents are: a) disease-specific activities, b) reduced unspecific side effects, and c) reduced immunogenicity. Novel methods for selection of antibodies are developed in close collaboration with a) Dr. Mehmet K. Tur, Experimental Pathology and Immunotherapy, Institute for Pathology, University Hospital Giessen and Marburg, Germany. Novel fusion proteins will be designed using advanced supercomputing tools to model dynamic 1 interactions of proteins, in close collaboration with Prof. Dr. Paolo Carloni, Institute for Advanced Simulation, Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany. Recombinant fusion proteins are mainly expressed in bacterial or mammalian cells and subsequently characterised in experimental settings, both in vitro on cell lines or primary material of patients and in vivo in transgenic/tumor-bearing mouse models.
Most Significant Paper Authored in 2024
Overcoming endosomal/lysosomal barriers: advanced strategies for cytosolic siRNA delivery
Li R., Zhu M., Hu X., Chen J., Yu F., Barth S., Sun L., He H. (2024)
This publication is based on a collaboration with Prof Huining He from Tianjin Medical University initially supported by the NRF SA / China Joint Research Programme on "Targeted delivery of siRNAs using recombinant SNAP tag based antibodies to treat leukemia. The review is describing major break throughs related to intracellular delivery of siRNAs we are using in our collaboration to improve our targeted delivery approach.