My current research interests are in “TB at the ends of life”, and I have two ongoing studies in this area:

TB in Pregnancy
In this study we are interested in determining immune responses and outcomes in children born to mothers with active TB. This is a completely understudied area, but available epidemiological data suggests that infants born to such mothers have the same mortality and morbidity as infants born to HIV positive mothers in the pre-ART era. This remains the case even if mothers are started on TB therapy during pregnancy. We will examine vaccine responses in infants over the first year of life.

Tissue-specific responses to TB infection
Here we are undertaking postmortem studies on individuals dying from TB, and in individuals who were otherwise healthy at the time of death. We believe that to fully understand a disease, and to design more effective vaccines, we must study the immune response at the site of infection. For M.tb, this is in the lungs. Our central hypothesis is that lung tissue resident cells are deficient in subset, function and anatomic location in individuals with active TB infection, compared to those with a LTBI, suggesting a major role for these subsets in the control of TB. This is a first-of-its-kind study and we will be able to compare tissue cell subset, function and anatomic location in unprecedented detail, for the first time in humans, using the latest cutting-edge immunological techniques.