Professor Margaret Feeney

Country: United States of America

Institution: University of California, San Francisco (UCSF)

Research Areas: Malaria Immunology

Lab Website: https://experimentalmedicine.ucsf.edu/laboratories/feeney-lab

The Feeney lab focuses on the human immune response to malaria, one of the greatest threats to child health worldwide. The broad goal of my program is to better understand protective immunity in order to guide the rational design of vaccines and immunomodulatory therapies. We are also interested in understanding how the immune response of infants and children differs from that of adults, in order to optimize the immunogenicity of vaccine strategies targeting infants. We use human biological samples and clinical data to identify in vitro correlates of protective immunity in both naturally malaria-exposed individuals and experimental vaccination settings. While there is abundant evidence that T cells are important for acquired immunity to malaria, the precise immune effector mechanisms responsible for protection have not been identified. Moreover, P. falciparum, has co-evolved with humans for >100,000 years and exerted enormous selection pressure on our species, inducing immunoregulatory mechanisms that interfere with the generation of effective, durable T cell responses needed for protection. My research program is based on collaborations with investigators in the Infectious Disease Research Collaboration in Uganda and at UCSF. This work is supported by a field-based laboratory in Tororo, Uganda, a region of extremely high malaria transmission intensity.