12 December 2024 – Gyaviira Nkurunungi, assistant professor at the Medical Research Council/Uganda Virus Research Institute and London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Uganda Research Unit, is interested in population differences in immunological response to vaccines. “Factors such as exposure to infection or your nutritional status modulate your immune system,” he explains. “We want to understand how combinations of these factors affect the way you respond to vaccines.”
Focussing on a panel of six vaccines representing different vaccine types, Nkurunungi’s research uses wet lab and computational tools to study how combinations of environmental factors, in particular infections, the gut microbiome and nutritional status, affect vaccine responses. This work is ongoing, but the story doesn’t end there, says Nkurunungi. Once he identifies the triggers, he will dig into the host biology, for example by exploring the single-cell epigenome and transcriptome, to uncover pathways responsible for low or optimal vaccine responsiveness.
With the help of large data sets, he and his team aim to reveal universal signatures that underpin how humans respond to multiple vaccines. “A goal very close to my heart is to find a set of signatures that would ensure that we can design vaccines that are optimal for all populations. That would be the magic bullet,” he says.
Nkurunungi is keen to make the most of the EMBO network now available to him. “I hope I will strengthen my current collaborations and find new ones through the EMBO Global Investigator Network,” he says. “I’m also keen to build our capacity as a team. I am looking forward to attending the EMBO lab leadership course, and to sending my team members to other labs and EMBL facilities to learn the skills they will need. Actually, I am itching to do this already!”
