Irina completed her Medical Degree and Ph.D. in biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of Hamburg, Germany. From 2015, she mainly focused on bioinformatics and has experience working with a variety of NGS data, including Ribo-seq, RNA-seq, TCR-seq, and ONT-seq. Currently, Irina is a postdoctoral medical bioinformatician in the Oxford Vaccine Group, where she works on big datasets derived from various clinical trials (including COVID-19 vaccine trial) and developing the pipelines for QC of NGS data.

Up to now, short-read RNA sequencing was the main approach to evaluate transcriptomic changes following vaccination within vaccine trials and after exposure to infection for human challenge studies. Even so, the shape of immune responses can be quantified and cross-compared; there are multiple limitations to this gold standard method. Moreover, the discovery of unique biomarkers which would allow distinguishing bacterial and viral infections, remains a challenging task. Here, we are aiming to evaluate the potential use of long-read sequencing in studying responses to the infection within clinical trials in comparison to the short-read RNA-seq approach.

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