Saravanan Ramakrishnan
Dr. Saravanan Ramakrishnan completed his Ph.D. in Veterinary Immunology and he has more than fourteen years of research experience in the area of innate immunity, vaccine, and adjuvant development. His team has developed a recombinant penton protein based indirect ELISA for the detection antibodies against Egg-drop-syndrome (EDS76) in chicken and also one subunit S1 glycoprotein based vaccine was developed and tested against avian infectious bronchitis. The vaccine candidate was found to afford partial protection against avian infectious bronchitis. Further, he is one of the inventors of the development of sub-viral particle-based subunit infectious bursal disease (IBD) vaccine for chickens. He also contributed significantly in the field of chicken innate immunity with some of the salient achievements viz., i) Demonstrated the synergistic interaction of LPS (TLR4 agonist) and resiquimod (TLR7 agonist) in chicken for the first time ii) Adjuvant potential of resiquimod (R-848) with inactivated NDV vaccine was demonstrated in SPF chicken iii) Resiquimod was proven to have prophylactic potency against vvIBDV challenge in chicken iv) Resiquimod in chicken induces Th1 as well as Th2 immune responses in chicken v) Resiquimod was found to enhance antigen specific systemic as well as mucosal immunity against avian infectious bronchitis vi) Poly I: C alone and its combination with Pam3CSK4 was found to significantly reduce immunosuppression when used with an intermediate plus IBDV vaccine.