Pathogen biology & basic science

The role of molecular and immunological sciences within the programme is twofold: first to support the development of new approaches to prevention and treatment of infectious diseases and second to provide tools for epidemiological and clinical studies. Studies fall to either side of (but do not include) product development. Thus they include early stage work on target identification (for vaccine or drugs) or mechanisms of pathogenesis, or later stage work around implementation, for example in examining correlates of protection in or the effect of interventions on pathogen populations.

Malaria has historically provided a major focus and more recently similar approaches have been developed for a range of invasive bacterial and viral pathogens. Kilifi provides high quality laboratories and a critical mass for much of this work. An important part of work on bacterial pathogens takes place in Nairobi, in collaboration with the KEMRI Centre for Microbiological Research ( CMR) and we propose to extend this capacity. Strategically key to all these areas is our long term collaboration with several groups at the Sanger centre, which brings state of the art rapid mass sequencing technologies to bear on important real world problems.