Excited to share the amazing PhD dissertation work of Jason Nideffer, who was mentored by Maria Grazia Roncarolo and myself. By following Ugandan children over time, Jason was able to track individual T-cell clones during and after malaria infections.
Kassie and Jason — It has been an absolute privilege to work alongside you on this work!
against this parasite, or why that protection is so hard to achieve and sustain. That's what drives the work in our lab, and today I'm thrilled to celebrate two publications from our team - and the investigators who led those studies.
We also found that the malaria response was dominated by type 1 regulatory T (Tr1) cells. These cells expanded with each malaria infection and kept their unique identity over time. Our findings shed light on malaria immunity, and how immune memory works more broadly. Congrats Jason!
Publications Alert- Malaria remains one of our oldest and most persistent adversaries — responsible for over 600,000 deaths annually, the vast majority in young children in sub-Saharan Africa. Despite remarkable progress, we still don't fully understand how the immune system learns how to protect
We found that the same T-cell clones could persist in blood for hundreds of days and re-expand when a child got malaria again. Although we’ve long known immune memory exists, this was one of the first times it’s been shown so clearly in humans.