I want to get into vaccine development. Which degree would be best for that? I've been looking at biomedical engineering PhD programs and was wondering if it is the best fit for vaccine research.
Depends on the kind of vaccine & the stage in the development process that you want to work.
Do you want to improve on existing, successful vaccines (eg: Gardasil, MMR)? [Industry]
Do you want to work on vaccines that require yearly update (eg: Flu)? [Industry/Gov]
Do you want to work on novel vaccines/vaccines in the development stage (eg: HIV)? [Industry/Gov/University]
Do you want to work on basic development/immunology for vaccines 20-30 years down the road (eg: perhaps some cancer- or alzheimers-specific vaccines)? [Mostly University]
I hope you can appreciate that different training may suit you for a particular area. Are you going to be the person coming up with the next breakthrough (biologist) or the slimeball copying another companies' design (biomedical engineer)? [
Said tongue-in-cheek]
Biomedical engineering encompasses a lot of things- and you need to decide at what point in the vaccine development process that you are interested in. Are you interested in maximizing pulling flu virus out of chicken eggs, or are you interested in making this effective and safe at enormous quantities/purificaton scales? Are you interested in engineering viral receptor proteins to be tissue-specific? Or are you interested in genetic engineering to make a vaccines more immunogenic? Are you interested in developing better aerosol delivery methods? Are you interested in really basic science or more on the translational/product side of things?
You definitely can use bioengineering training for vaccine research, but you will need to tailor your PhD/post-doc to what you want to do for your career.
