Institute: University of Edinburgh
Biography
Wiebke first worked with volunteers experimentally infected with malaria during her EviMalaR-funded PhD in the labs of Jean Langhorne and Robert Sauerwein. To build on this expertise she moved north to work with Phil Spence at the University of Edinburgh asking a single question: “how do children become immune to severe, life-threatening malaria?”. To answer it, she uses samples from the first human rechallenge model in almost 100-years, developed by their collaborators Angela Minassian & Simon Draper at the University of Oxford, in which volunteers are infected with Plasmodium falciparum or P. vivax three times over a 12-month period. This unique experimental medicine approach led to her uncovering several inducible mechanisms of disease tolerance, which operate independent of parasite density. She could therefore show that in the first instance immunity to malaria prioritises host fitness over parasite clearance.
Wiebke is passionate about developing and applying systems immunology tools (from ultra-low input ChIPseq to single cell RNAseq and masscytometry) to human challenge models and to use those insights to develop a new generation of anti-disease vaccines.
Key Publications
A list of publications can be found here.
Web Links of Interest