Grant: Project Grant

Many infectious diseases are initiated following pathogen deposition into the skin by an insect vector but subsequently cause systemic disease. These diseases include Malaria, Lyme's Disease, Zika and West Nile virus disease and Leishmaniasis. These infections represent a current and growing global health problem, accounting for 17% of the human global infectious disease burden. Increasing or altered geographical distribution of insect vectors due to climate change and increased migration, travel and urbanization of human populations is exposing larger numbers of people to vector transmitted infections. In Canada, the spread of West Nile virus disease and Lyme's disease emphasizes the need for institutions to meet the challenge of vector-transmitted infections in a changing world. A major factor contributing to the manner in which these infections cause disease is their ability to move around the body after deposition into the skin by an insect bite. Understanding how vector transmitted infections disseminate out of the skin and subsequently move around the body is understudied, and how various treatment options influence this dissemination is almost completely unknown. This new knowledge is especially relevant to prophylactic vaccination against disseminating vector transmitted pathogens, where, despite old assumptions that the skin stage of infection is transient and somehow less important than subsequent systemic stages, the early expression of immunity at the dermal site of vector inoculation may be essential for vaccine efficacy. We aim to define and understand how pathogens leave the skin and move around the body in order to develop therapies or strategies to prevent this from happening, thereby reducing the burden of disease caused by vector transmitted disseminating infections.