Institute: Radboud University Medical Center
Biography
After completing her undergraduate studies in 2007 at the University of Bath, UK, Katharine began working in malaria research at the Jenner institute, University of Oxford, UK. In Oxford she assessed the safety and protective efficacy of candidate malaria vaccines against sporozoite challenge in Phase 1/2b clinical trials, and evaluated the vaccine induced immune responses to detect markers or correlates of protection. Katharine obtained her PhD at the University of Oxford in 2014, and for her thesis research she designed and produced an improved RTS,S like malaria vaccine called R21, which is now under evaluation in Phase 1/2b clinical trials in Oxford and West Africa. In 2015 Katharine joined the Clinical Tropical Medicine laboratory at QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute, Australia as a Postdoctoral researcher. She trained and led a multidisciplinary team who performed the mosquito rearing, gametocyte culture, mosquito feeding assays, and molecular analysis of blood and mosquito samples. She demonstrated for the first time, the safe and reproducible induction of P. falciparum and P. vivax gametocytes in CHMI study participants at densities infectious to mosquitoes ¾ thereby establishing new models for early clinical evaluation of transmission-blocking interventions. Since completing this work Katharine moved to Radboud university medical centre in Nijmegen, where she is continuing to develop the CHMI-transmission model and is also leading field studies based in Burkina Faso. These studies aim to evaluate the malaria infectious reservoir, evaluate the development of transmission-blocking immunity and assess the impact of community based interventions on malaria infection prevalence and transmission.
Key Publications
A list of publications can be found here.