Mechanisms of malaria immunity, and vaccine design
Vaccination is one of the greatest scientific inventions in history. It has saved hundreds of millions of human lives by rendering harmless diseases (e.g. the plaque) that once wiped out large portions of human populations. No other scientific invention, except perhaps quantum mechanics, has had so much success in preserving human life and improving well-being.
Despite this enormous success, vaccination is yet to provide solutions to human scourges like malaria and HIV/AIDS. Presently vaccine design mostly relies on a pathogen-focused approach (Frimpong et al. Front Immunol 2018) that is tedious and full of guess work. Recent mathematical and technological advances have opened the doors to radically new ways of designing vaccines, which promise to accelerate progress towards controlling diseases like malaria.
A key remaining barrier to designing an effective malaria vaccine is the limited knowledge that exists about the mechanisms and determinants of malaria immunity in humans. We are working to elucidate these mechanisms and determinants by using various approaches and tools, including field studies, wet-lab experimentation, high-throughput sequencing of lymphocyte repertoires, mathematical modeling, and advanced computational techniques.
Collaborators: Augustina Frimpong (PhD student), Dr Michael Ofori, Dr Asamoah Kusi
To learn more about this work, check out the following:
- Novel strategies for malaria vaccine design
- Characterization of T cell activation and regulation in children with asymptomatic Plasmodium falciparum infection
Dynamics of immune cell populations, and implications for susceptibility to diseases
The dynamics of immune cell populations govern the ability of these cells to prevent diseases. Effective immune responses require activation, proliferation, differentiation, migration, and death of specific immune cell populations. We are developing and testing various hypotheses about the mechanisms that govern these cell dynamics as well as the implications for individual susceptibility to diseases including cancer. So far, we have elucidated an intriguing mechanism that governs the temporal separation of the activation of regulatory and effector T cell populations based on co-stimulation dynamics.
This work relies on mathematical models based on, among other branches of mathematics, differential equations including the stochastic master equation (SME). We have developed a mathematical approach to extracting biologically useful insights from our SME models by exploiting certain regularities found in the models.
Collaborators: Prof Jonathan Dushoff, Prof Gisele Mophou, Buri Gershom (PhD student), Chilperic Kuate (PhD student)
To learn more about this work, check out the following: