 We work on rheumatic fever, rheumatic fever is a disease that disproportionately affects Māori and Pacific children in New Zealand. It's a disease that when left untreated can go on to cause permanent heart valve damage and have detrimental, long-term detrimental effects on those children's health. We know that rheumatic fever develops after a strep infection, but what we don't understand very well is what happens in between. So in our research we're trying to understand the errors that the immune system makes in between a strep infection and the development of rheumatic fever and picking apart those mistakes so that we can understand the disease better and in the longer term this should enable us to develop new treatments and therapies for the disease. We've been taking blood from children with rheumatic fever and looking at the antibodies in their blood and trying to understand how they differ from the antibodies in the blood of children without the disease. By understanding those differences and what those antibodies are and where they're binding we can then develop strategies to try and negate the effects of those damaging antibodies. So there are no diseases out there that I'm aware of where the disease pathway or the disease process is not understood and we have a therapy. So understanding how this disease occurs is really imperative to being able to develop new therapies.