Ahmed M. Salman

Dr Ahmed M Salman is a Senior Immunologist-Vaccinologist and a research group leader working in Professor Sir Adrian Hill’s Lab at the Jenner Institute, at the University of Oxford – in partnership with Pirbright Institute – for developing innovative vaccines against cancerous, or infectious diseases, caused by human and veterinary pathogens. Dr Salman’s work aims mainly to identify, design and assess new target antigens as vaccine candidates for infectious diseases caused by human and veterinary pathogens (including Malaria, COVID-19, T Solium, and others) or cancerous diseases, using the most advanced technologies in immunology, vaccinology, molecular biology, biochemistry, proteomics, bioinformatics, genome editing, protein expression, and vaccine manufacturing. The promising vaccine candidates are assessed as target antigens and expressed in the most suitable vaccine platform including: viral vector vaccines to mainly induce cellular immune response; viral like particle (VLP) to induce a massive humoral immune response; or other platforms ( https://www.jenner.ac.uk/team/ahmed-salman)

Dr Salman took his BSc degree in Biochemistry at Ain Shams University in Cairo, Egypt in 2006 and from then until late 2011 was an instructor at the Department of Biochemistry, Faculty of Science, Ain Shams University. In parallel, he completed a successful Master’s degree on tuberculosis immunology and immune-diagnosis in 2011 from the Biochemistry department at Ain Shams University in Egypt, in collaboration with SSI, Copenhagen University in Denmark. Most of that laboratory work was done while he worked at Statens Serum Institut in Copenhagen, Denmark, which is a major centre for mycobacterial vaccine research. In 2011 Dr Salman won a PhD scholarship at the European Virtual Malaria Institute programme “EVIMalaR” funded by the European Commission and EMBL at Heidelberg, Germany. In 2012 Dr Salman started his DPhil (PhD) in clinical medicine at the University of Oxford in Professor Sir Adrian Hill’s Lab in Jenner Institute, in collaboration with Professor Chris Janse and Professor Shahid Khan, at the Leiden University Medical Centre in The Netherlands, aiming for the identification and assessment of novel human malaria vaccines. Dr Salman produced his DPhil thesis in October 2014 and the DPhil degree in Clinical Medicine was awarded to him in May 2015 from the University of Oxford ( https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid%3A8c0e9338-3f33-4c83-b673-c17906ca1e38).

Dr Salman is a Co-PI and Senior Immunologist/Vaccinologist in different scientific research projects for vaccines development and clinical trials funded by national and international research funders, including Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, European Commission, and Medical Research Council (MRC). The most important recent impact of his work has been on antigen down-selection for vaccine clinical trials. Dr Salman is a member of many international scientific communities, including the British Society for Immunology (BSI), the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (ASTMH), and the International Veterinary Vaccinology Network (IVVN). Dr Salman is named as an inventor on three different Plasmodium falciparum Malaria vaccine patents that have been funded either for GMP manufacturing and clinical trials (https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2015052543A3/en).

In addition to the P. falciparum malaria vaccines, Dr Salman has a major contribution on another promising novel P. vivax malaria sporozoite vaccine that is about to move to GMP manufacture and clinical trials. Since April 2020 Dr Ahmed Salman became a part of the broad Jenner Institute research group, working on Oxford/AZ ChAdOx1 nCov-19 coronavirus vaccine. Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine was a game-changer in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic and the most widely distributed vaccine globally against SAR-CoV-2 virus with over two billion doses of the vaccine have been released, to more than 170 countries.