What are three key points you would like people to know about your vision for the next 10 years of research from the Parasites and Microbes programme?
Back in the early days, if you sequenced one Escherichia coli it was suggested you can then understand all E. coli strains. That now seems absurd. Genomic landscapes can vary greatly from one bacterium sequenced from soil to the same type of bacterium sequenced from a hospital patient. We’ve moved on from thinking at a single-species level. We now look at variation across genera and phyla. Currently, we are really good at mapping global diversity of bacterial strains. We’ve learned how major pathogens like Vibrio cholerae, which causes cholera, have spread across the world in our lifetimes.
So, looking ahead, we want to dig even deeper, something that is now possible to do because we understand more complex principles and mechanisms about how bacteria, parasites, and viruses are evolving. In the next decade, we must harness our collective expertise both at the Sanger Institute and around the world, to look further ahead. We will work towards studying what’s driving microbial and parasite evolution, their interactions with each other and us and our immune system - all at the scale of whole populations.
Now is the time for the Sanger Institute’s Parasites and Microbes programme to be more ambitious to derive new insights to unlocking infectious disease patterns. We can do this by sequencing whole genomes at the population, rather than single bacterium, level.
If I had to put my strategy for the future of the programme into three key points, I would say that we want to:
Study pathogens and disease at a global scale
Align our research with key health priorities relevant worldwide
Approach infectious disease in context
We are interested in answering the question how climate change and the environment influencing health status? How does prior exposure to a pathogen contribute to immune priming? These questions, and many more, remain unanswered – but our collaborative research can address them.