Prof.
Susanna Dunachie
NDM Centre for Global Health Research, Nuffield Dept. of Medicine, University of Oxford, UK
Title: Developing New Vaccines Against Escherichia coli
Each year many people around the world die from bacterial infections. Increasing rates of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) indicate an emerging crisis where infections are becoming harder to treat and may become untreatable. Escherichia coli is responsible for the most bacterial deaths each year related to AMR. The World Health Organization has recommended research on developing vaccines to prevent or reduce the impact of these infections as an important priority.
People who would benefit most from vaccines against E. coli include new-born babies, the elderly, people with diabetes, cancer and/or underlying immune problems, patients about to have major operations and people experiencing frequent urinary tract infections. Developing vaccines against E. coli is challenging due to the presence of many virulence factors to target, significant variability between bacterial strains, and the potential impact on the gut microbiome. There is a wealth of international expertise from bacteriology and mouse model studies, and several vaccine candidates including glycopeptide approaches currently in clinical trials.
We seek to build further knowledge around how humans respond to infection – especially which bacterial components are targeted during infection, and the contribution of the cellular arm of the immune response. Work by our team is using clinical cohorts of patients with bloodstream infections (BSIs) to define target proteins for E. coli for development into vaccines and monoclonal antibody therapies. Our goal is to design “anti-disease” vaccines that stop people getting severely ill, and reduce the chance of needing antibiotics or allow shorter courses of antibiotics. We have a pipeline for selection of target proteins of interest from global patient genomic studies, and are assessing the antibody and T-cell responses in patients with BSIs compared to responses in healthy and at-risk individuals (including older adults), using cohorts in UK.
We aim to work in partnership with global expertise to select the most promising bacterial targets and make candidate vaccines using adenovirus vector and mRNA technologies, for onward testing in mouse models and ultimately in Phase 1 clinical trials.
Biography of the presenting author
Professor Susanna Dunachie is Director of the NDM Centre for Global Health Research at Oxford University, Co-Director for Oxford Global Health and Honorary Consultant in Infectious Diseases and Travel Health Lead in the NHS. She is also Adjunct Professor at Mahidol University, where she has collaborated with Thai partners since 2011. Her focus is understanding immunity to infection and vaccines in vulnerable populations, especially for bacteria including B. pseudomallei (melioidosis), E. coli and Klebsiella species. Her lab has a special interest in the impact of diabetes on immunity. Suanna has published over 200 scientific papers with over 70,000 citations and leads the T cell work package of the Wellcome-funded SEACOVARIANTs consortium in SE Asia. She is a steering committee member for the European Global Health Research Institutes Network and is the immunology advisor for the UK government’s New and Emerging Respiratory Threats Advisory Group (NERVTAG).
Presenting author details
Full name: Susanna Dunachie
Contact number: +447803042976
Email: Susie.dunachie@ndm.ox.ac.uk
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/susanna-dunachie-37a56232
Researchgate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Susanna-Dunachie?ev=hdr_xprf
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=PemqDT8AAAAJ&hl=en
ORCID: 0000-0001-5665-6293
Website: https://www.tropicalmedicine.ox.ac.uk/team/susie-dunachie