 My name is Francis Dungu and I am from the Camry Welcome Trust program in Kenya. The several immunology group includes scientists who are studying the sales of the human immune system and the product they make in order to understand how people become immune to disease either following natural infection or immunization. So this group has got people who are working with HIV and other viruses. It's got people working with malaria and there are also people working with malnutrition. I'm personally interested in malaria and malaria vaccines and so my work includes understudying naturally acquired immunity and picking whatever reasons we can learn from it to develop a malaria vaccine. So our platform for malaria immunology in Kirifi is based on two platforms. One platform is conducting long-term longitudinal studies in children and the other platform is using experimental medicine where we infect people being exposed to malaria in order to identify individuals who are immune to malaria. We can identify people who are immune to malaria and then we compare the immune responses to malaria with people who are not yet immune. Then we can identify immune responses that can be used to identify antigens that we can include in vaccines. Another way that my work would help in developing malaria vaccines is helping in understanding why it is so difficult to immunize people who live in endemic areas. So one of the things that we've learned in the last few years is that if you develop a vaccine in Oxford or in America and those vaccines actually take quite well in animal models and in malaria naive individuals but when you move them to malaria endemic areas they are not very immunogenic and they are not as protective so it appears like prior exposure to malaria modifies the immune system making it more difficult to immunize people and my work is also trying to understand what that modification is and how it can be counteracted in delivering an effective vaccine. So one of the most exciting research projects that we've conducted in Kirifi recently is comparing the immune response to malaria in individuals who are currently infected with malaria so people who are living with constant infections these are people who are being persistently infected or they have chronic infections and we also have another group of individuals who were exposed to malaria a long time ago but they are not exposed to malaria because malaria has been controlled in the area where they live so in other words it's like comparing immune responses to malaria in individuals who are currently living with malaria and individuals who were historically infected a long time ago and what we've found is that current exposure interferes or impairs and the ability of the cells in these individuals to respond to malaria antigen in the way we would expect So in the last 5 to 10 years one of the great things that have happened of course is that so funders like the Welcome Trust have decided to support experimental human medicine that is for infections like malaria where it's easy to treat the disease and you can infect people who are semi immune to malaria in order to understand immunity to malaria and that is one of the things that we are doing in Kenya at the moment and that is very exciting because the immuno epidemiological studies happening in the field are confounded by many factors that makes it hard to make conclusive decisions on which immune responses or antigens that we can use for vaccines so other things that have lines of investigation that have come up in the last 5 to 10 years is that we have seen improvement in high throughput technology for screening antigens that can be included in vaccines and I think that is also quite good and also in the world of immunology so people have learned how to make human monoclonal antibodies and these human monoclonal antibodies especially in the case of HIV also immunity and cancer are actually being considered as immuno therapeutics and in some cases also infectious diseases we can use these monoclonal antibodies in the discovery for antigens that could be used in vaccines and I think that is also quite exciting and in some cases the same monoclonal antibodies can be used to broke any undesirable immune responses that may result in the immune response causing disease or interfering with immunization I think it is really important for us to understand naturally acquired immunity to malaria because as you know malaria continues to be a major public health issue in the countries in Africa and in Southeast Asia and what we have seen in the last 3 years even though we have effective drugs for treating malaria and insecticides for controlling malaria through killing mosquitoes is that the malaria control has stored and so we need new tools to be included together with the current tools to drive malaria transmission down further and my research will inform the design and the development of new vaccines and other therapeutics