For the last three years, Olubukola Abiona, has been working as a post-baccalaureate Intramural Research Training Award (IRTA) Fellow at the National Institutes of Health Vaccine Research Center to develop vaccines for viruses like SARS, MERS and, most recently, COVID-19.
Abiona, 24, said that she and her team, led by Dr. Barney Graham, are very fortunate that their current work with the coronavirus vaccine is not something new to the facility.
“The coronavirus research was spearheaded five or six years before the COVID-19 outbreak,” Abiona said. “[During that time] we’ve been looking at different strains of the coronavirus: those that cause colds or even more severe strains such as those that cause SARS and MERS.”
A Passion for Research
Abiona graduated from Eleanor Roosevelt High School in 2013 with an interest in research that she credited to the school’s Science and Technology program. “We were learning a lot of information from a textbook,” Abiona said. “But I wanted to learn more about how we got the information that was in our science textbook.”
After a research internship at the University of Maryland, College Park, Abiona developed a passion for medicine as well. A degree in biochemistry and molecular biology from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County’s Meyerhoff Scholars Program solidified her career interests in more translatable applications of basic science research.
Now, Abiona said, she is grateful to be in a lab where she wears multiple hats and is able to help in many different areas of vaccinology. Although each day brings new assignments, Abiona said that her main responsibilities include vaccine development and protein production.
“When your body produces antibodies, we want to see how potent they are,” Abiona explained, “So, we set up a mimic vaccine and see if the antibodies can stop a fake, or pseudo-, virus from entering cells in a dish in the lab.” Because vaccine development involves working with mimic systems, Abiona said that neither live viruses, nor a virus that is harmful, are ever used in these experiments.
Abiona’s second main responsibility, protein production, involves screening samples from animals. “If we are testing an animal, when we immunize them we don’t know if there’s going to be a response or not. That’s the experiment,” she explained. “By making this protein, we’re able to tell whether or not they have a response.”
While these are just two of Abiona’s hats, she said that her day-to-day work life also means pivoting to where she is needed. Whether it’s to aid in the organization or facilitation of an experiment, Abiona said, “I step in and help wherever I can.”
This story is part one in a two-part series about Olubukola Abiona’s work with the Vaccine Research Center to develop a coronavirus vaccine. To learn more about Abiona’s research and what drives her through this public health crisis, pick up next week’s paper for part two.
Brogan Gerhart is a University of Maryland student in journalism working as an intern for the News Review.