Dr Danish Munir

Danish Munir is a Postdoctoral Scientist working in Immunological Toolbox (ITBX) team at The Pirbright Institute. Danir graduated with a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine (DVM) in 2009 from University of Agriculture Faisalabad, Pakistan, and an MSc in Biotechnology in 2011 from University of East London, England. In 2019, Danish secured an Elphinstone scholarship to pursue his PhD at University of Aberdeen, Scotland where he developed novel single domain antibodies (Abs) IgNAR from sharks against Salmonid Alphavirus.

Danish has a particular interest in B-cell immunology and antibody technology i.e., antibody engineering, in vitro Abs selection and affinity maturation, and development of novel in vitro platforms for Ab development. Danish joined ITBX in 2020 as Antibody production specialist and then secured a Postdoctoral position in the same project July 2021.

Currently, Danish is researching the development of novel immunological reagents and platforms for veterinary vaccinology research.

Danish’s has been involved in the following projects at Pirbright:

• Design, optimisation, and construction of panel of expression vectors to express different antibody classes and Fab fragments from multiple veterinary species
• In vitro 3D culturing & differentiation of cattle PBMCs using organ-on-chip technology.
• Production of foot and mouth disease virus (FMDV) VLPs using baculovirus expression
• Recombinant expression of FMDV specific camelid VHH antibody fragments
• Hybridoma cell culture and high throughput sequencing of hybridoma cell lines
• NGS data analysis of hybridoma-derived monoclonal antibody variable regions
• Recombinant expression, purification, and characterisation of monoclonal antibodies