HIV, Inflammation and the Microbiome

The focus of our work is to understand risk factors for sexually transmitted infections, including HIV, and adverse birth outcomes in women and girls. We aim to use this knowledge in developing affordable and feasible tools that improve women’s and girls’ sexual and reproductive health, particularly in resource-limited settings.

We work with communities to conduct clinical studies that collect socio-demographic and health data. We also collect clinical samples to study the vaginal microbiome by:

• measuring microbial proteins (metaproteomics)
• isolating and characterising bacteria (culturomics).

We investigate immune profiles by measuring inflammatory proteins (proteomics, luminex, ELISA) and HIV target cell populations (flow cytometry).

Using this data, we work with machine learning to discover biomarkers of different conditions for low-cost point-of-care test development. These biomarkers include vaginal inflammation, bacterial vaginosis and spontaneous preterm birth.