 I am Isabella Oyer, I work at the Chemri Welcome Trust Programme as a senior research scientist working on the malaria parasite. So what my research involves is I look to understand mutations in the malaria parasite and these mutations allow the parasite to resist drugs so confer resistance to anti-malarial drugs and then help them to escape so that the drugs don't kill them. Another set of mutations that I try to understand is the stage of the parasite that gets into the red blood cells and causes disease so the disease that we see like fever and chills and the stage of the parasite has a set of proteins that allow it to invade red blood cells. On these proteins there are mutations and as scientists we're not entirely sure what those mutations are doing so part of my work is to understand do these mutations allow the parasite to escape the host immune system which fights and protects us from disease or do those mutations actually allow the parasite to invade the red blood cells better and cause disease so those are the two areas that I look at. So one of the challenges is in malaria is finding a malaria vaccine that will work and those challenges arise because the parasite has a lot of mutations which is what I've just described previously saying that these mutations cause the parasite to either escape the host immune system so if these mutations allow the parasite to do that we need to find a way to understand them so we can produce better vaccines. So for instance one of the lead vaccine candidates at the moment is a protein called RAH5 in simplicity but it's a protein on the stage of the malaria parasite that allows it to invade red blood cells and it's been shown to be quite important in helping the parasite do this work and so my work looks in Kilifi which is a malaria endemic population to understand how many mutations do we see in this protein and can we then find a way of understanding what they do in the protein. The current vaccine that's being rolled out in an implementation trial in western Kenya to see how best to introduce it into the public like in the children's vaccination schedule. One of the limitations is it doesn't give you 100% protection. So that's where my work would come in to say can we find other potential candidates on the malaria parasite that could probably make that vaccine more efficacious or could we do a combination of different candidates so that we can improve how this vaccine would work in the field. So my work goes, it's very early on in vaccines so it's understanding the biology of that molecule at the molecular level to inform what these mutations be doing and if we know what they're doing is their way we can then design a vaccine to encompass all those issues that arise from understanding the protein. I'd say in Africa, in sub-Saharan Africa, in Kenya as well I think it's very clear that malaria is a public health concern, a big public health concern. It causes a lot of illness in children under five and pregnant mothers and generally being unwell is not a nice thing. So the work that I do tries to find different vaccine candidates that we can put forward to make a malaria vaccine. So the importance is and I think it's been shown in other diseases is if you have a vaccine to a particular organism that causes disease of bacteria or a virus then you can prevent people from getting sick and we're not able to do that at the moment with malaria. So my work, the purpose of my work is to understand the proteins that we could use to inform vaccine design. What's been interesting in the field at the moment is the emergence of resistance to artemisthen in Southeast Asia. Now that's been a great concern because if that spreads globally then we will not have a drug that we can use to protect people or to treat people rather. The other good thing that came out of that is a molecular marker which is what we call a gene that we know the mutation that confets resistant artemisthen. That's been described. So that obviously helped the anti-malarial resistance field because it means we can now study that gene in populations in Africa and understand do we have the mutations that they've seen in Southeast Asia in Africa. If we do that would be a cause for concern. But as it stands in the field for the studies that have been done here in Kilifi by myself and others in other African countries those mutations have not been identified. So at the moment we're in a good place in terms of how the drugs are working in Africa but it still means that we've got to maintain surveillance and monitoring anti-malarial resistance particularly to artemisthen because it's a very good drug works very well and if we lose that then I think it will cause a problem for malaria control. How my work impacts on translational medicine. So I work primarily in the lab using molecular biology tools to understand mutations for instance in drug resistance. With this we're able to inform national drug policy by saying are these mutations present in the population and if they are then that would inform a change in drug policy. So previously for instance we were using self-adox in pyromethamin. Molecular work was done to show the mutations are present in Kenya and that informed the national malaria control program that they need to consider changing the drug that we use. And so currently what I'm doing is maintaining surveillance on markers involving artemisthen resistance that will then feed into a policy in the long run as to whether we should be changing drug or not. So the roles that I play in the policy forums to try and influence decisions that are made around malaria public health policy. So for instance I work quite closely with the national malaria control program and in fact we're the lab that is doing the molecular work for their drug trials. So recommendation is you have to do drug trials in children but we need the molecular work to understand whether the drugs are working well or not. And without the molecular work you can't say that the drugs we're using to treat malaria at the moment are working well. So that's where our role comes in in terms of understanding these mutations in these markers that confer resistance to drugs. The other way I'm involved with the national malaria control program is helping them see the importance of molecular work generally in informing primarily drug resistance and its utility as a good way of screening the population to understand what's the distribution of these mutations in Kenya and that might inform where would you target particular drugs in the event that is drug resistance.