Dysregulation of immune memory during chronic infectious diseases

Chronic infectious diseases have a devastating effect on global health. HIV and Plasmodium falciparum both cause chronic disease and have evaded effective vaccine design. Production and function of memory is altered in chronic infectious diseases, with recent work segregating memory B cells generated in chronic infection into classical memory and ‘atypical' memory B cell populations. However, the role of the latter is unclear, and whether atypical memory has a positive or negative impact on classical memory responses is controversial. It is clear that revealing the origin and function of these cells, and how their formation is regulated at the molecular level, will be important for development of new antibody-based vaccines for these diseases. This project will use multiomic single-cell sequencing to investigate the requirements for formation and regulation of atypical memory B cells. See Pupovac and Good-Jacobson Current Opinion in Immunology 2017 for a recent review of this field.