Grant: Project Grant

Strategies designed to prevent and treat diseases caused by pathogens that specifically infect cells of the innate immune system have been met with limited success. These include Leishmaniasis, Tuberculosis, and fungal infections, resulting in significant global morbidity and mortality. In this grant we suggest that this failure is critically associated with an incomplete understanding of how infected innate immune cells respond to and elicit protective immunity. The objective of this grant is to gain a better understanding of the dynamics of immunity against this class of pathogens and to define mechanisms by which these pathogens modulate infected innate immune cells, even in settings of pre-existing immunity generate by vaccination. The new knowledge obtained by these studies should inform downstream development of novel intervention strategies which, instead of targeting a specific disease (i.e. vaccines or anti-microbials against a specific pathogen), target a shared infectious process in innate immune cells. These immuno-therapeutic approaches to treatment are likely to be successful against diverse pathogens and help alleviate the growing problem of antimicrobial resistance and long-term drug-treatment regimes.