System-based Approaches To Inform The Design Of Immunotherapies And Immunodiagnostics Against Chronic Pathogens
Funder
National Health and Medical Research Council
Funding Amount
$849,540.00
Summary
Chronic infectious diseases such as malaria are responsible for an enormous public health burden worldwide. New approaches to develop effective interventions against such pathogens are urgently required. Over the next 5 years, I will use innovative genome-based and systems-levels approaches to discover novel pathogen antigens and host immune pathways that underlie protective immunity, immunomodulatory pathways that can be then targeted for intervention, and biomarkers of immunity or disease.
The development of protective immunity is essential to fight infection. This depends on a small number of master regulatory transcription factors that drive the differentiation of precursor cells into mature immune cells such as NK, T and dendritic cells. This proposal will provide a fundamental advance in our understanding of immune cells and impact strategies aimed at the prevention and treatment of pathogen infections.
Delineating Immune Circuits For Innate And Adaptive Immune Protection
Funder
National Health and Medical Research Council
Funding Amount
$876,005.00
Summary
The immune system provides the essential frame-work to protect us against infection, disease and to heal tissues after trauma. This is achieved by a complex but elegant network of different types of white blood cells. Understanding the molecular wiring of these cells will provides fundamental insights to how the body fights pathogen infections and cancer and lays the foundation to therapeutic approaches to vaccination and disease treatments.
My research is aiming to study how the immune system controls viral infections in transplant patients and use this information to bolster their immunity in a test tube, providing protection against a virus the patient is unable to fight after their transplant. We are also trying to develop new strategies to use patient's own blood cells which will be grown in the laboratory and returned to the patient, resulting in a full recovery.