Dr Rafi Ahmed, Vaccine Center Director at Emory Vaccine Center; Professor at Department of Microbiology and Immunology; Scholar at Georgia Research Alliance and Investigator at Emory Center for AIDS Research, recently visited India. The renowned immunologist shared in details about the reason behind his visit, his current research projects and the evolving role of immunology is clinical practice, in a short interview with Lakshmipriya Nair
What is your agenda on this visit to India? Are there any research collaborations in the offing?
Yes, we have an ongoing research collaboration on ‘Dengue Virus Infection in India’ that is funded by the US NIH. This research is being done at the Emory University Vaccine Center Laboratory at ICGEB in New Delhi. The project involves collaborations with physicians and scientists from ICGEB, AIIMS (Delhi), CMC (Vellore), NIV (Pune) and THSTI (Delhi).
In addition, on this trip I visited Strand and Mazumdar-Shaw Cancer Center in Bengaluru and we are looking forward to starting a new and exciting research programme in India on cancer immunology and cancer immunotherapy in collaboration with MSCTR and STRAND.
You have received a five-year grant of $35.6 million grant from the National Institutes of Health for HIV/AIDS research? Can you give us more details about the progress of the project?
This grant was awarded to the Emory Vaccine Center in Atlanta to develop strategies for developing an effective HIV vaccine that will induce long-lived immunity. The PI’s of the project are Dr Eric Hunter and Dr Rama Amara.
One of your long-term goals have been to understand the mechanisms of B and T cell immunological memory and develop vaccines to tackle AIDS. How close are you to achieving this goal?
We have several projects addressing this most critical question about vaccine-induced immunity. Dr Bali Pulendran at the Emory Vaccine Center has identified adjuvants that promote the generation of long-lived plasma cells that reside in the bone marrow and are essential for long-term antibody responses.
Why has an effective HIV vaccine eluded us so far? What are the challenges which have not been tackled?
The key challenges are inducing neutralising antibody responses that can protect against diverse HIV strains and making sure that such antibody responses can persist for many years.
Cancer is yet another serious menace plaguing today’s world. How can immunotherapy change the way cancer care is delivered?
Cancer immunotherapy is now one of the most exciting areas of biomedical sciences. striking progress has been made during the past few years showing that blockade of inhibitory receptors such as PD-1 can have promising results in the treatment of many different types of cancers. We hope to initiate research collaborations in this area with Mazumdar-Shaw Cancer Center and Strand in Bengaluru.
You and your team were also working on project to develop a universal flu vaccine. Can you share some key highlights of this areas of your research over the years?
Yes, this is another very active research programme at the Emory Vaccine Center and it is headed by Dr Walter Orenstein and Dr Richard Compans.