̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Derek Smith

Vulnerability to different COVID-19 mutations depends on previous infections and vaccination, study suggests

jg533 — Fri, 06 Oct 2023 08:00:00 +0000

A new study has found that people differ in how vulnerable they are to different mutations in emerging variants of SARS-CoV-2.

This is because the variant of SARS-CoV-2 a person was first exposed to determines how well their immune system responds to different parts of the virus, and how protected they are against other variants.

It also means that the same COVID-19 vaccine might work differently for different people, depending on which variants of SARS-CoV-2 they have previously been exposed to and where their immune response has focused.

̽��ֱ��discovery underlies the importance of continuing surveillance programmes to detect the emergence of new variants, and to understand differences in immunity to SARS-CoV-2 across the population.

It will also be important for future vaccination strategies, which must consider both the virus variant a vaccine contains and how immune responses of the population may differ in their response to it.

“It was a surprise how much of a difference we saw in the focus of immune responses of different people to SARS-CoV-2. Their immune responses appear to target different specific regions of the virus, depending on which variant their body had encountered first,” said Dr Samuel Wilks at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Centre for Pathogen Evolution in the Department of Zoology, first author of the report.

He added: “Our results mean that if the virus mutates in a specific region, some people’s immune system will not recognize the virus as well - so it could make them ill, while others may still have good protection against it.”

̽��ֱ��research, published today in the journal Science, involved a large-scale collaboration across ten research institutes including the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and produced a comprehensive snapshot of early global population immunity to COVID-19.

Researchers collected 207 serum samples - extracted from blood samples - from people who had either been infected naturally with one of the many previously circulating SARS-CoV-2 variants, or who had been vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2 with different numbers of doses of the Moderna vaccine.

They then analysed the immunity these people had developed, and found significant differences between immune responses depending on which variant a person had been infected with first.

“These results give us a deep understanding of how we might optimise the design of COVID-19 booster vaccines in the future,” said Professor Derek Smith, Director of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Centre for Pathogen Evolution in the Department of Zoology, senior author of the report.

He added: “We want to know the key virus variants to use in vaccines to best protect people in the future.”

̽��ֱ��research used a technique called ‘antigenic cartography’ to compare the similarity of different variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. This measures how well human antibodies, formed in response to infection with one virus, respond to infection with a variant of that virus. It shows whether the virus has changed enough to escape the human immune response and cause disease.

̽��ֱ��resulting ‘antigenic map’ shows the relationship between a wide selection of SARS-CoV-2 variants that have previously circulated. Omicron variants are noticeably different from the others – which helps to explain why many people still succumbed to infection with Omicron despite vaccination or previous infection with a different variant.

Immunity to COVID-19 can be acquired by having been infected with SARS-CoV-2 or by vaccination. Vaccines provide immunity without the risk from the disease or its complications. They work by activating the immune system so it will recognise and respond rapidly to exposure to SARS-CoV-2 and prevent it causing illness. But, like other viruses, the SARS-CoV-2 virus keeps mutating to try and escape human immunity.

During the first year of the pandemic, the main SARS-CoV-2 virus in circulation was the B.1 variant. Since then, multiple variants emerged that escaped pre-existing immunity, causing reinfections in people who had already had COVID.

“ ̽��ֱ��study was an opportunity to really see - from the first exposure to SARS-CoV-2 onwards - what the basis of people’s immunity is, and how this differs across the population,” said Wilks.

This research was funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and National Institutes of Health.

Reference

Wilks, S H et al: ‘Mapping SARS-CoV-2 antigenic relationships and serological responses.’ Science, October 2023. DOI: 10.1126/science.adj0070

10 October 2023: New projects to kickstart future vaccine development awarded UKRI funding

̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� has been awarded £3.46 million by the UKRI as part of a consortium project, PROVAC: Evolutionarily smart vaccine strain selection for proactive vaccinology.

This project aims to enhance the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine strain selection process to provide the best possible protection for the UK population. It will predict which variants may emerge in the future and measure immune responses against this potential future evolution. This will enable researchers to choose the variant of the virus to use in the next vaccine.

Continual monitoring and updating of the variant is necessary to protect those at high-risk of complications from COVID-19, who will require further vaccinations against the evolving virus.

Professor Derek Smith at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Centre for Pathogen Evolution/ Department of Zoology will lead the consortium, which also involves researchers at Imperial College London, Francis Crick Institute, ̽��ֱ�� College London Hospitals, and the ̽��ֱ�� of Glasgow. ̽��ֱ��consortium is the direct result of the researchers’ substantial involvement in multiple aspects of the UK COVID-19 response.

̽��ֱ��award is made as part of UKRI’s five-year strategy Transforming Tomorrow Together 2022 to 2027 to harness the full power of the UK’s research and innovation system to tackle large-scale, complex challenges. In total £25m has been awarded to new projects to tackle epidemics and disease mutation.

Read UKRI's full award announcement here.

This page was originally published on 6 October 2023 and last updated: 10 October 2023.

A person’s immune response to variants of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, depends on their previous exposure – and differences in the focus of immune responses will help scientists understand how to optimise vaccines in the future to provide broad protection.

It was a surprise how much of a difference we saw in the focus of immune responses of different people to SARS-CoV-2.

Sam Wilks

Alexandra Koch on Pixabay

Virus variants

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Could bird flu spark the next pandemic - and are we prepared if it does?

jg533 — Tue, 13 Jun 2023 08:01:07 +0000

Should we be worried about frequent news reports of flu being detected in birds and other animals?

Spanish Flu: a warning from history

Anonymous — Fri, 30 Nov 2018 09:22:27 +0000

̽��ֱ��early origins and initial geographical starting point of the pandemic still remain a mystery but in the summer of 1918, there was a second wave of a far more virulent form of the influenza virus than anyone could have anticipated.

Soon dubbed ‘Spanish Flu’ after its effects were reported in the country’s newspapers, the virus rapidly spread across much of the globe to become one of the worst natural disasters in human history.

Doctors, nurses and volunteers were left helpless as their patients, the majority previously healthy young adults, languished and died from respiratory failure. There is now a broad consensus among experts that in just three years, Spanish Flu killed between fifty and one hundred million people. Despite this, public awareness of the disaster and the ongoing threat posed by influenza remains limited.

To mark the centenary and to highlight vital scientific research, the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge has made a new film exploring what we have learnt about Spanish Flu, the urgent threat posed by influenza today, and how scientists are preparing for future pandemics. ̽��ֱ��film presents original photographs from the 1918 outbreak and exclusive interviews with four leading experts:

Dr Mary Dobson, a historian of infectious diseases
Professor Derek Smith, Director of Cambridge’s Centre for Pathogen Evolution
Dr AJ te Velthuis, a virologist studying how RNA viruses amplify, mutate and cause disease
Professor Julia Gog, a mathematician of infectious diseases including influenza

One hundred years ago, celebrations marking the end of the First World War were cut short by the onslaught of a devastating disease: the 1918-19 influenza pandemic.

Spanish Flu: A Warning from History

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Global consortium rewrites the ‘cartography’ of dengue virus

cjb250 — Thu, 17 Sep 2015 18:00:11 +0000

Dengue virus infects up to 390 million people each year. Around a quarter of these people will experience fever, headaches and joint pains, but approximately 500,000 people will experience potentially life-threatening complications, including haemorrhage and shock, where dangerously low blood pressure occurs. There are currently no vaccines against infection with dengue virus.

For decades, scientists have thought that there are four genetically-distinct types of the virus, known as serotypes, and that antigenic differences between the types play a key role in the severity of disease, its epidemiology and how the virus evolves – and hence these differences would be important in vaccine design.

When we become infected, our immune system sends out antibodies to try and identify the nature of the infection. If it is a pathogen – a virus or bacteria – that we have previously encountered, the antibodies will recognise the invader by antigens on its surface and set of a cascade of defences to prevent the infection taking hold. However, as pathogens evolve, they can change their antigens and disguise themselves against detection.

One of the unusual aspects of dengue is that in some cases when an individual becomes infected for a second time, rather than being immune to infection, the disease can be much more severe. One hypothesis to explain this is that the antibodies produced in response to infection with one strain of the virus somehow allow viruses of a different strain to enter undetected into cells, implying that antigenic differences between the serotypes are important.

Researchers from the Dengue Antigenic Cartography Consortium, writing in today’s edition of Science, analysed 47 strains of dengue virus with 148 samples taken from both humans and primates to see whether they indeed fit into four distinct types. ̽��ֱ��researchers found a significant amount of antigenic difference within each dengue serotype – in fact, the amount of difference within each serotype was of a similar order to that between the different types. This implies that an individual infected with one type may not be protected against antigenically different viruses of the same type, and that in some cases the individual may be protected against some antigenically similar strains of a different type.

Leah Katzelnick, a researcher from the Department of Zoology at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, who began studying dengue after herself contracting the disease, says: “We were surprised at how much variation we saw not only between the existing four known types of dengue, but also within each type. This means that hypotheses that put antigenic differences at the centre of dengue epidemiology are now back on the table.”

Senior author Professor Derek Smith, also from the Department of Zoology at Cambridge, adds: “This discovery is in many ways similar to when researchers first began using the microscope – it will give us a new way of looking at dengue and in much closer detail than before. Now we can ask – and potentially answer – the interesting questions about how the virus evolves and, importantly, why a first dengue infection is often mild while many second infections are life-threatening.”

Characterising the global variation of dengue viruses will be important for understanding where current vaccines will be protective. In the future, it may assist us in determining which strain to include in vaccination programmes and to follow the virus as it evolves, say the researchers.

̽��ֱ��Dengue Antigenic Cartography Consortium is an open, global collaboration of dengue researchers set up in 2011 to establish how large samples of dengue isolates relate to one another antigenically. ̽��ֱ��Consortium currently consists of epidemiologists, clinicians, geneticists, cartographers, molecular biologists, government officials, and vaccine developers, based in laboratories in Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, and the Pacific. As results from the project become available, they are shared with members of the Consortium.

Reference
Katzelnick, LC et al. Dengue viruses cluster antigenically but not as discrete serotypes. Science; 17 Sept 2015.

An international consortium of laboratories worldwide that are studying the differences among dengue viruses has shown that while the long-held view that there are four genetically-distinct types of the virus holds, far more important are the differences in their antigenic properties – the ‘coats’ that the viruses wear that help our immune systems identify them.

This discovery is in many ways similar to when researchers first began using the microscope – it will give us a new way of looking at dengue and in much closer detail than before

Derek Smith

JAVIER DEVILMAN

Aedes Albopictus mosquito (cropped, lightened)

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A very personal perspective on Dengue fever

cjb250 — Tue, 20 Jan 2015 00:00:28 +0000

Dengue outbreaks, caused by bites from infected mosquitoes, are common in many developing countries. Four billion people live in areas with the disease, although mortality is relatively low. There are 400 million infections a year: 500,000 people develop severe infection symptoms and approximately 25,000 of these die. However, it places a huge burden on the health services of countries where there are major outbreaks. “Epidemics can swamp public health and intensive care services,” says Leah. “They create fear even if there is a low likelihood of death and in many countries virtually everyone knows someone who has died from it, most of whom are children.”

For her PhD she has been working with both human and non-human primate sera in partnership with the US-based National Institutes of Health. Isolates from some of the main strains of the dengue virus are injected and Leah studies the immune sera to chart the inter-relationship between the four main strains of the virus. Dengue only causes mild infection in the non-human primates she works with.

Leah, who majored in anthropology as an undergraduate in the US, travelled to Nicaragua in her third year as part of a summer fellowship programme on international health. Her aim was to learn about different health systems and beliefs about health. Her research involved talking to people in non-governmental organisations (NGOs) about their aims and talking to people on the ground about how the NGOs were perceived. Then she contracted dengue fever and became very sick and was admitted to hospital.

“There is no cure for dengue and only the symptoms can be treated. In the most mild cases dengue is asymptomatic. Normally people suffer from joint ache, headaches, pain behind the eyes and a strange rash on the hands. In the most extreme cases they suffer from haemorrhagic fever and a rapid drop in platelet count and blood pressure which can cause the body to go into shock. Children who go into shock have a high mortality rate, but if they get good healthcare they can survive,” says Leah.

She spent a week in hospital being monitored for possible shock. Her vascular system was so traumatised afterwards that she felt very weak. ̽��ֱ��experience led to her doing a lot of research on dengue fever and caused her to rethink her future since people who have been exposed to dengue fever before are more likely to suffer the more extreme form the next time round. As an anthropologist she would have needed to travel and mainly to places where there was dengue fever, but she did not want to risk getting it again.

Leah applied for a fellowship from Williams College in the US to study at Cambridge and spent the summer before in a dengue laboratory in North Carolina estimating transmission of dengue fever in Sri Lanka.

Once at Cambridge, she googled dengue fever research on the university website and the only person she came across who mentioned it was Professor Derek Smith, who studies infectious disease in the Department of Zoology. She read his paper on antigenic cartography and the evolution of flu viruses and felt it could be applied to the four different types of dengue and the complex interaction between those types. She wanted to design an antigenic map for dengue which would show the relationship between the different viruses and how having one might protect you from having that same strain again while having the others could make your feel worse.

She emailed Professor Smith and put her proposal to him. He said there was no funding for a project on dengue. However, Leah’s fellowship allowed her to switch the focus of her studies after a year. That meant she could get funding for a year. She then applied to do a PhD to continue her work and for a Gates Cambridge Scholarship to support her.

Leah began her PhD in 2012 and hopes to complete it next year. She has been working round the clock on her research and says it was initially terrifying since her background was in anthropology rather than lab-based science. Since then she has been presenting her findings at international meetings such as the World Health Organization and has submitted a paper for review to a top journal. She plans to keep working on dengue fever after her PhD is completed and to better understand the human immune response to dengue virus infection so that scientists can limit its impact.

Leah Katzelnick was all set for a career as an anthropologist until she contracted dengue fever. She was in hospital for a week with severe symptoms. It changed her life. She is now working on a new perspective on dengue fever which involves mapping the complex interaction between different strains of the virus, based on similar work done by Cambridge experts on flu.

There is no cure for dengue and only the symptoms can be treated

Leah Katzelnick

James Gathany

Aedes aegypti mosquito

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Staying ahead of the game: Pre-empting flu evolution may make for better vaccines

cjb250 — Thu, 20 Nov 2014 19:00:02 +0000

In a study published today in the journal Science, the researchers in the UK, Vietnam, ̽��ֱ��Netherlands and Australia, led by the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, describe how an immunological phenomenon they refer to as a ‘back boost’ suggests that it may be better to pre-emptively vaccinate against likely future strains than to use a strain already circulating in the human population.

Influenza is a notoriously difficult virus against which to vaccinate. There are many different strains circulating – both in human and animal populations – and these strains themselves evolve rapidly. Yet manufacturers, who need to produce around 350 million doses ahead of the annual ‘flu season’, must know which strain to put in the vaccine months in advance – during which time the circulating viruses can evolve again.

Scientists at the World Health Organisation (WHO) meet each February to select which strain to use in vaccine development. Due to the complexity of human immune responses, this is decided largely through analysis of immune responses in ferrets to infer which strain best matches those currently circulating. However, vaccination campaigns for the following winter flu season usually start in October, by which time the virus may have evolved such that the effectiveness of the vaccine match is reduced.

“It’s a real challenge: the WHO selects a strain of flu using the best information available but is faced with the possibility that the virus will evolve before the flu season,” explains Dr Judy Fonville, one of the primary authors on the paper and a member of WHO Collaborating Centre for Modelling, Evolution and Control of Emerging Infectious Diseases at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge. “Even if it does, though, it’s worth remembering that the flu vaccine still offers much greater protection than having no jab. We’re looking for ways to make an important vaccine even more effective.”

According to the WHO, seasonal influenza causes between 3 and 5 million cases of severe illness each year worldwide, up to 500,000 deaths, as well as significant economic impact. Vaccination policies vary per country, but are typically recommended for those at risk of serious complications, such as pregnant women and the elderly. ̽��ֱ��seasonal flu vaccine has been described as one of the most cost-effective measures of disease prevention, and vaccination therefore has a large health economic benefit. Currently 350 million people partake in annual vaccination programmes. Yet there is room for improvement.

After gathering an extensive amount of immunological data, the team modelled the antibody response to vaccination and infection using a newly developed computer-based method to create an individual’s ‘antibody landscape’. This landscape visualises an individual’s distinct immune profile like a three dimensional landscape with mountains in areas of immune memory and valleys in unprotected areas. ̽��ֱ��technique enables a much greater understanding of how our immune system responds to pathogens such as flu that evolve and re-infect us.

A key finding from the work is that upon infection, a response is seen not just to the infecting influenza strain, but to all the strains that an individual has encountered in the past. It is this broad recall of immunity, that they term the ‘back-boost’, that is the basis for the proposed vaccine improvement.

Dr Sam Wilks, one of the primary authors, explains: “Crucially, when the vaccine strain is updated pre-emptively, we see that it still stimulates better protection against future viruses yet this comes at no cost to the protection generated against currently circulating ones.

“Faced with uncertainty about how and when the flu virus might evolve, it’s better to gamble than to be conservative: if you update early, you still stimulate protection against current strains – much worse is if you update too late. Rather than trying to play ‘catch-up’, it’s better to anticipate and prepare for the likely next step of influenza evolution – and there is no penalty for doing it too soon.”

Professor Derek Smith, also from Cambridge, adds why this may lead to improved vaccines in a relatively short timeframe: “ ̽��ֱ��beauty of this approach is that it would not require any change to the current manufacturing process. From the point that the new strain has been selected through to an individual receiving their shot, the steps will be exactly the same. ̽��ֱ��only difference would be greater protection for the recipient.”

̽��ֱ��team is now combining this research with their other work on predicting the way in which the virus will evolve, and plan to combine these two major pieces of work in prospective clinical trials.

̽��ֱ��international collaboration included researchers from: the Erasmus Medical Center, the Netherlands; the Oxford ̽��ֱ�� Clinical Research Unit & Wellcome Trust Major Overseas Programme and the National Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology, Vietnam; and the WHO Collaborating Centre for Reference and Research on Influenza at the Victorian Infectious Diseases Reference Laboratory in Melbourne. Its principal funders were the Wellcome Trust and the US National Institutes of Health Centers of Excellence for Influenza Research and Surveillance (CEIRS).

Reference
Fonville, JM et al. Antibody landscapes after influenza virus infection or vaccination. Science; 20 Nov 2014

An international team of researchers has shown that it may be possible to improve the effectiveness of the seasonal flu vaccine by ‘pre-empting’ the evolution of the influenza virus.

Faced with uncertainty about how and when the flu virus might evolve, it’s better to gamble than to be conservative

Sam Wilks

Daniel Paquet

Flu Vaccination Grippe (cropped)

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Harnessing the power of research to benefit developing countries

gm349 — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 15:36:33 +0000

On Thursday 2 May, the CEO of the GAVI Alliance, Dr Seth Berkley, will discuss how to harness the power of research to expedite the development of vaccines appropriate for developing countries and improve access to them.

Dr Berkley’s talk will set out how the GAVI Alliance’s public-private partnership model brings together donors, developing countries, industry, civil society and academia to solve the challenges of reaching every child with vaccines no matter where they are born.

GAVI leverages expertise across a variety of sectors, including innovative financing for development, supply chain management, the development of mobile phone platforms for the collection of epidemiological data, mathematical modelling of infectious disease and health economics and policy.

Prior to joining GAVI in 2011, Dr Berkley was the founder, president and CEO of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) for over a decade. His talk, ‘Harnessing the power of science research and the public and private sector: a 21st century model for international development’, is the Wellcome Trust-Cambridge Centre for Global Health Research’s inaugural lecture.

Dr Berkley’s talk will be followed with a presentation by the world-leading flu expert, Professor Derek Smith, Director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Modelling, Evolution and Control of Emerging Infectious Diseases at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge. There will be an opportunity for questions and answers after the talks.

̽��ֱ��evening begins at 5.30pm at the Howard Lecture Theatre, Downing College, Cambridge (map). If you would like to attend, please RSVP: http://wt-cghr-cambridge-gavi-lecture.eventbrite.com/

Professor David Dunne, Director of the Wellcome Trust-Cambridge Centre for Global Health Research and host of the lecture, said: “By partnering with globally important organisations such as the GAVI Alliance, Cambridge’s multi-disciplinary research and technology communities can have a more profound effect on international development, public health, and the lives of people in the developing world.”

“As an innovative public-private partnership, the GAVI Alliance works to harness the expertise and experience from a range of sectors to help us to improve access to lifesaving vaccines for children in developing countries,” said Dr Seth Berkley, CEO of the GAVI Alliance. “Our partners range from WHO and UNICEF to donors – including the UK government – implementing countries, vaccine manufacturers, civil society organisations, and academia.

“We have made great progress in the past decade, but the stark reality is that 22 million children born every year around the world don’t receive the immunisation they need against potentially fatal childhood illnesses. Supply chain management, improving the quality of vaccine coverage data and developing vaccines that remain highly effective outside of cold storage systems are just some of the challenges which, if they can be overcome, would have a huge positive impact on GAVI’s ability to reach more children.

“Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� has an outstanding reputation for academic research, coupled with its commitment to Africa, which makes it an ideal forum to set out the challenges and opportunities in improving access to immunisation in developing countries.”

̽��ֱ��GAVI Alliance is a public-private partnership which aims to immunise a quarter of a billion additional children in the developing world with life-saving vaccines by 2015. With GAVI support, countries are now introducing new vaccines against the primary causes of two of the biggest childhood killers in the world: pneumonia and severe diarrhoea. Together these diseases account for 30% of child deaths in low-income countries. It was established in 2000 by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the UK government and others to improve access to immunisation.

̽��ֱ��Wellcome Trust-Cambridge Centre for Global Health Research status was awarded to the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge in February of this year. ̽��ֱ��Centre plans to capture and capitalise on the extensive basic biomedical and health-related research capacity across many departments and research institutes in Cambridge. It will make this fully available for research capacity building and knowledge exchange partnerships with African universities and institutes, as a means of improving the health and welfare of those in low- and middle-income countries.

CEO of GAVI Alliance to give Wellcome Trust-Cambridge Centre for Global Health Research inaugural lecture

We have made great progress in the past decade, but the stark reality is that 22 million children born every year around the world don’t receive the immunisation they need.

Dr Seth Berkley, CEO of the GAVI Alliance

Harnessing the power of science research and the public and private sector

gavi_2012_olivier_asselin

Vaccinations in Ghana

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Cambridge researchers support the WHO

lw355 — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 14:27:31 +0000

̽��ֱ��WHO Collaborating Centre for Modelling, Evolution and Control of Emerging Infectious Diseases recognises the work of Cambridge researchers who work in this area.

̽��ֱ��Centre, directed by Professor Derek Smith in the Department of Zoology, has pan-university and highly interdisciplinary activities with members of the Department of Zoology, Department of Pathology and Department of Veterinary Medicine in the School of Biological Sciences, members of the School of Clinical Medicine, and also from the Department of Architecture and Computer Laboratory.

̽��ֱ��Centre is linked with researchers throughout the world and is concerned with global infectious disease issues that affect not only the developed world, but also the developing world. For example the Centre has close cooperation with the Cambridge in Africa program, in particular on researching the dengue virus.

One of the long-standing activities of the Collaborating Centre is to provide support for WHO activities in the global surveillance of influenza and other pathogens – including dengue and enterovirus 71 – as well as recommendations on suitable vaccine strains for use in these and other emerging and re-emerging diseases.

Each year, influenza infects 5–15% of the world’s population and kills up to half a million people – a figure that can rise to many millions in the event of a pandemic. Spearheading the annual race to identify the best vaccine to combat seasonal flu, the WHO collates information about the flu viruses in circulation worldwide in the preceding months.

As part of this process, Dr Colin Russell in the Department of Zoology curates a global database of information on the rapidly changing variations (called antigenic differences) in the influenza coat protein – the part that makes it difficult for our immune system to recognise flu from one year to the next.

“Our WHO Collaborating Centre is in the privileged position of informing public health initiatives through highly translational scientific research, using technology that allows real-time detection of circulating viruses that escape protection conferred by current vaccines,” said Smith.

̽��ֱ��Centre uses a technique called antigenic cartography developed by Smith with Dr Alan Lapedes (Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico) and Professor Ron Fouchier (Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam). ̽��ֱ��technique analyses antigenic differences between pathogens, allowing real-time detection of circulating viruses that escape protection conferred by current vaccine strains. “Antigenic maps allow us to make sense of vast amounts of difficult binding assay data. One can see at a glance the global picture of decades of viral evolution,” added Smith.

In addition, the Centre carries out research on the evolution of pandemic influenza. “We can start asking questions such as how close is nature to evolving an aerosol-transmissible form of bird flu that can be transmitted from human to human, as opposed to the varieties we have seen so far that have been passed to individuals in close contact with infected birds,” said Smith.

̽��ֱ��work of the Centre is underpinned by the activities of Cambridge Infectious Diseases, a multidisciplinary community of researchers that promotes, develops and supports initiatives which focus on infectious diseases.

WHO Collaborating Centres are designated by the WHO Director-General to carry out activities in support of the Organization’s programmes on areas such as nursing, occupational health, communicable diseases, nutrition, mental health, chronic diseases and health technologies.

For more information, please visit www.whocc.infectiousdisease.cam.ac.uk/ or download the WHO Collaborating Centre for Modelling, Evolution and Control of Emerging Infectious Diseases brochure.

A newly designated Collaborating Centre at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge will support the World Health Organization (WHO) in detecting and responding to major epidemic- and pandemic-prone diseases.

Our WHO Collaborating Centre is in the privileged position of informing public health initiatives through highly translational scientific research.

Professor Derek Smith

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Researchers at the WHO Collaborating Centre for Modelling, Evolution and Control of Emerging Infectious Diseases

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