This Program Grant brings together a world-leading team of experts to elucidate mechanisms that protect most people from infection by making antibodies, and their failure caused by genes or infections like influenza or HIV. The team will determine mechanisms that protect most people from making antibodies against normal parts of our body, whose failure causes numerous autoimmune diseases including rheumatoid arthritis. The team will develop ways to engineer better antibodies.
The development of cures, vaccines and better treatments for HIV/AIDS is an urgent global health priority. This team of seven groups in Sydney and Melbourne will study how HIV can lie dormant in some parts of the body, evading eradication by HIV therapy, as well as how the immune system responds to the virus. This will allow for design of novel vaccines and treatments. The researchers have skills in basic virology and immunology, and translating laboratory findings into human clinical trials.