RSV Revisited: Immune responses in a post-vaccine era

Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) is an extremely common childhood infection, leading to a substantial burden of hospitalisation, and long term sequelae in infected infants. Infant bronchiolitis is also a highly predictive factor for later life airway disease. Therefore, preventing childhood RSV infection can have huge, lifelong benefits.

Until recently the only way to prevent RSV infection was a prohibitively expensive monoclonal antibody. However, the past five years have seen an enormous shift in RSV prevention – with the license of three new vaccines and two new antibodies. This has opened up many exciting avenues of investigation for understanding the host response to the virus and how the virus mutates under immune pressure.

Speaker:
Professor John Tregoning is currently professor of Vaccine Immunology at Imperial College London, where he has studied the immune responses to vaccination and respiratory infection for more than 25 years. His group is currently focusing on the immune response to RNA vaccination and RSV infection (exploring how the virus evolves under antibody pressure). Professor Tregoning has written more than 90 peer-reviewed scientific articles and over 50 articles on scientific careers for Nature, Science and Times Higher Education. He is also the author of two books Live Forever? and Infectious.