Project description
Linking viral immunity and pathogen fitness
How does immunity change over time? What drives pathogen fitness? The ERC-funded DENGEN project is using dengue virus as a model system to explore these fundamental questions. By analysing long-term immune responses and viral data collected in Thailand from 1973 to the present, the study will track changes in individual immunity over decades. Researchers will also quantify how the fitness of circulating dengue strains has evolved, examining factors like viral spread in mosquitoes, human cell dynamics, and population immunity. The overall goal is to uncover how pathogen fitness is influenced by immunity and ecological factors, providing valuable insights into disease ecology and contributing to our understanding of global public health threats.
Objective
Across pathogens, it remains unclear why some lineages persist while others die out. Population immunity pressure coupled with relative abilities to infect and disseminate in hosts are likely to play a critical role. There are key data and methodological gaps that prevent us from identifying and quantifying drivers of pathogen fitness. We need robust measures of fitness and be able to apply these measures to sequences from the same ecological disease system over many years. We also need to understand how an individual's immunity responds, if at all, to ongoing exposures by continuously changing pathogens. Finally, we need appropriate methods that can integrate candidate drivers of fitness within the same analytical framework. Using dengue virus as a model system, I will use annual sequence data from Thailand collected from 1973 to today alongside long term measurements of immune responses in the same individuals over 25 years apart to answer the following questions:
- How does individual immunity change over decadal time frames? I will re-recruit individuals who were infected with dengue virus during participation in cohort studies in the 1990s. I will measure their antibody response today to viruses that have circulated over the past 58 years, including the specific virus that infected them in the 1990s. I will compare their responses today to those in stored samples from the original cohort study.
- What are the drivers of fitness? I will quantify the changing fitness of circulating dengue viruses from 1973 to today. I will then explore how changes in viral dissemination in mosquitoes, changes in kinetics in human cells and the build up of strain-specific population immunity interact to determine viral fitness.
By studying the dynamic interplay between pathogen fitness, host immunity and vector, this project will explore a fundamental concept of disease ecology, as well as providing insights into a major threat to global public health.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- natural sciences biological sciences microbiology virology
- natural sciences biological sciences ecology
- natural sciences biological sciences zoology invertebrate zoology
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2024-COG
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
CB2 1TN CAMBRIDGE
United Kingdom
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