 My name is Faith Osir. I'm Kenyan. I work on malaria. I have two labs, one in Kenya at the Chemri Welcome Trust Research Programme and one in Germany at Heidelberg University Hospital. We try to understand how we can make better malaria vaccines because it's still a big problem for Africa. But the exciting thing is that if you get infected by malaria repeatedly, you eventually become resistant to it. You can have the infection, but it doesn't make you ill. And so in Africa, this plays out that little kids, little children, they get really sick and they can die from malaria, but the adults, they're resistant. They get the infection and it doesn't bother their bodies. And so what we try to do is to understand how this happens so that we can make vaccines that will then protect the little kids. That's mostly true for falciparum malaria and to a less extent for the other malaria. But falciparum is the highest, is the most common type that we have in Africa and that's what all my work focuses on. Well, as a junior doctor, I got interested in malaria when I went to work as an intern. So I ended up at the coast of Kenya. Lovely. I came from the capital city Nairobi. It seemed so romantic to go and work at the coast. I thought at the end of a busy day, I'll be strolling on the beach. Didn't quite work that way. But once I finished there, then you're posted to a district hospital. So you're sort of going away further inland, away from the city. And I ended up in Kilife County Hospital. And that's where I found people who were doing research on malaria. And I was working on the ward and there were lots of patients with malaria. I could admit five children a night with severe life-threatening malaria. And so it was surprising to me that this is a treatable disease. We're still seeing lots of patients with the disease. And then there were people researching the disease who seemed really clever. And I couldn't figure out, well, if you're so clever, why can't you just fix it? And that's how I got drawn into studying it myself. Yeah, so malaria is difficult to solve because it's a complex parasite. It's big. It exists in your body in multiple forms. And it goes into different parts of your body. And the question that I found the researchers asking is how do people become immune to malaria? And I couldn't understand why they seemed to ask the same question over and over again. But as I got into the research, I began to understand that when you're trying to measure what makes you and I immune, in the lab, you can measure one thing, two things. As time has grown, you can measure hundreds of things, even thousands of things. So from the time that we started, the few things that we could measure, they like fitted a puzzle, a corner of a puzzle. And then the more things that you can measure as technology gets better, you add more pieces to your puzzle. And that's what I think is happening with us understanding immunity, the parasites complex, where complex, and we're trying to fit that puzzle together and we're some way to completing the full puzzle. And that's why we don't have a vaccine yet. So two things, when you're that, you know, maybe it wasn't as clear, two things drew me into moving from a doctor to becoming a vaccinologist. And the first, and they didn't, I didn't realize them all at the same time. But the first one was, the first one is when you're a doctor, you can see you're really limited by your physical body, the number of patients that you can see in a day. Even if you think you're superhero, within a day, you're going to see the number of patients that you can see, and then you're going to drop down exhausted. So as a doctor, your impact is defined really by your physical limits. But as I've done research, it's been so much more exciting, because now you lead teams of people, it's like multiplying yourself. And so what I could do in one day, now I do 30 times that in one day, because I've got all those people working on different aspects. So I think, if you also think about it in the sense that if I treat you for malaria today, good for you, you go home, but there's hundreds where you came from that would also need the treatment and need the doctors. So if I could make a vaccine, wow, that would get rid of the problem, save the doctor's time for something else, and save people's lives. So that's why I'm keen on vaccines. So in my line of research, I think it's become really interesting in the last decade. And that's because of increases developments in technology. So when I started to do this work just over 10 years ago, we knew so little about the parasite in terms of at the molecular level, you know, how many proteins are there in this parasite? What do they look like? How do they change over time? We didn't know that. But in the course of doing my research, technology has advanced so that now we know that in detail, not for one parasite, but for many malaria parasites. And so that's been fascinating because you can understand how big your puzzle is in a better way than you could when you only knew a few things. So I think that's been fantastic. And then also on the immunology side, understanding how our bodies work, technologies advance so much. I used to measure your antibodies, how you respond to the parasite, one protein at a time. Now I do 400 proteins in a single experiment. And then now I have a new challenge is how do I analyze that data quick enough to see which are the important responses that I'm making? So I think it's a really exciting time. And I feel very optimistic that you know, we're making progress in the right direction. I'm optimistic that we can have a vaccine in five, 10, 15 years. I think that as a community of scientists, we've not understood the magic that would give us a vaccine. But a lot of science happens by serendipity. So I'm a strong believer that even though we can't see the direction exactly that we must keep working. And that moment of, aha, we'll find us on the bench doing what we do. We've already developed a tool. It's a chip. We call it kill chip. It's a protein microarray that's got parasite proteins stuck on it. And if I have a blood sample from you, I can run it on my chip and I can tell you what your response to malaria was. And that's becoming an increasingly useful tool for us to try and understand the immune response and work out what might be good for a vaccine and might not be good for a vaccine. So to me that's already translational. We're using it in studies where we have volunteers who are infected with malaria and we're studying the immune response using that chip, both for falciparum and actually we're even making one for plasmodium vivax now. But the ultimate translation will be bringing a vaccine to the clinic and that's where we really want to go. So I think that the world should put a lot more money into malaria research because it has a huge impact on millions of people. When you do the math, and this was done some years ago now, it was estimated that if you add up all the costs of people going to clinic, laying at home, slow at school, all the problems that result because of malaria, this costs Africa 12 and a half billion US dollars every year. Now Africa needs all the money it can get for all sorts of other things, let alone malaria. So if we could get rid of malaria, I think we could move Africa towards the sustainable development goal of good health, well-being, economic prosperity.