Meet Bhawana Shrestha, Microbiologist Who Has Engineered Sperm-Killing Antibodies To Prevent Pregnancy

Frustrated by a lack of non-hormonal birth control options, microbiologist Bhawana Shrestha engineered sperm-killing antibodies to prevent pregnancy. These anti-bodies trap and kill sperm before they get a chance to fertilize. The method got tested in animal models and has been able to kill 99.9% of sperm. Scientists are hopeful that it could potentially be used as a human contraceptive in the future.

Here's what you need to know about Bhawana Shrestha

Her Linkedin Bio says that she is a protein engineer with expertise in next-generation antibody design.

It further says that she is a goal-driven scientist who thrives in cross-functional collaborations and is an analytical thinker who is energized by complex, challenging problems.

She has been pursuing her PhD from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Microbiology and Immunology is her field of study since May. There, she is engineering multivalent anti-HIV and anti-gonorrhea IgG antibodies for STI therapeutics and employing affinity maturation via yeast display to generate anti-sperm IgG Fab with enhanced binding-affinity for effective non-hormonal contraception.

She has also been a Graduate research student at Chapel Hill. During that time,  she developed a novel antibody-engineering platform (multivalent-IgG) to enhance the agglutination potency of antibodies and also utilized multivalent-IgG platform to engineer ultra-potent anti-sperm antibodies (10- to 16- fold) for non-hormonal contraception.

She assembled the utility patent application on multivalent-IgG platform which is licensed by Mucommune, LLC and Inhalon BioPharma, Inc.

She raised >$3 million in funding from NIH to advance the development of antibody-based female contraceptive.

She also investigated the humoral immune response of mice against ZIKA virus.

She also investigated the role of regulatory B cells in pancreatic tumorigenesis. Before this, she did her Bachelor's in Biochemistry from 2012 – 2016 from Claflin University.

She was also the student member of American Chemical Society Chapter at the university.

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