Dr. rer. nat. Dina Raafat

Dr. Dina Raafat has been working as a Postdoc at the Institute of Immunology since 02/2016. She has since been involved in a number of collaborative EU and BMBF large-scale projects, where she has been studying the antibody response to Staphylococcus aureus in several infection settings, including pneumonia, endocarditis and prosthetic joint infections.

Dr. Raafat has been involved in the EU-consortium "COMBACTE" (https://www.combacte.com/), dedicated to combating antimicrobial resistance. Within COMBACTE, she has been concerned with establishing an immunological platform ("infection array") allowing the simultaneous detection of the antibody response to several pneumonia-causing pathogens, including S. aureus, and hence the detection of pathogens based on their immunological footprints. Her aim is to study whether the immune response to infection might shed light on the causative pathogen, and might, therefore, have a potential diagnostic value. Recently, she has launched – together with the Orthopedic Department at the UMG - a clinical study “JointInfect”, to evaluate the pathogen-specific antibody response to prosthetic joint infection.

Another research focus of Dr. Raafat involves passive vaccination with monoclonal antibodies, which is believed to be highly specific therapeutic and preventive strategy. Within the Card-ii-Omics (https://www.card-ii-omics.med.uni-rostock.de/) project, which involves cardiac implant infections, the potential of this strategy for the control of endocarditis with biofilm formation is being addressed. For that purpose, Dr. Dina Raafat has focused on the identification of interesting antibody targets and the generation of respective murine, humanized as well as human monoclonal antibodies against S. aureus biofilm-associated virulence factors.

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