Today, Coefficient Giving is launching the Strep A Vaccine Fund, a multi-donor initiative to accelerate vaccine development against one of the world's most neglected infectious diseases relative to its scale. Strep A kills ~639,000 people a year. There is no vaccine. I think that can change 🧵

As always involved a great team including @rhcmcg.bsky.social @nat-lorenz.bsky.social @drannanz.bsky.social at UoA plus long term collaborators at Otago, the Kids @tbarnett.bsky.social, Menzies @annapralph.bsky.social and many more not on 🦋

We’re excited to announce our latest paper @natcomms.nature.com: ‘CXCR3 is associated with T-cell-induced heart damage in acute rheumatic fever.’ We found evidence for T cell migration out of the blood and into heart valves during inflammatory rheumatic fever. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Acute rheumatic fever is an autoinflammatory disease @njmoreland.bsky.social, @rhcmcg.bsky.social report widespread antibody heterogeneity, yet identify a protein expressed in cardiac muscle as an immunodominant autoantigen: doi.org/10.1172/jci....

New paper out in JCI Insight: PhIP-Seq uncovers marked heterogeneity in Acute Rheumatic Fever Autoantibodies. ARF is a serious sequela of Strep A infection. While autoantibodies are known to drive pathogenesis, the specific human protein targets remain unclear. Link: doi.org/10.1172/jci.... 1/5

This deep dive into the clinical phenotype of rheumatic fever highlights extreme diversity in presenting symptoms. An important observation from the START study, and highlights why better diagnostic tests are needed 🧪 @annapralph.bsky.social @rhcmcg.bsky.social bmjopen.bmj.com/content/15/7...

Following relaxation of #COVID19 restrictions surges in infections from respiratory pathogens like RSV and #StrepA have been seen in many countries including Aotearoa New Zealand. Did waning immunity contribute? We explored this concept in our latest work, see 🧵 academic.oup.com/jid/advance-...

Finally jumping into 🦋 - and what better way to do than highlighting this super thread. Wonderful to have been involved in this study with our Strep A friends across the Tasman

🎉 I'm a #newPI , and I'm so excited to share our new paper out in Nature Comms today! 🧵 rdcu.be/d2gBV Quick intro for the new followers: I'm from Monash Uni in Melbourne, and we study T and B cell responses to viruses, bacteria & parasites with the goal of improving vaccines. #ImmunoSky #MicroSky