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Full NameProfessor Rachel McLoughlin

Biochemistry&Immunology

Trinity College Dublin

Webpage:www.tcd.ie

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Research Fields

infectious disease and the immune system

Postgrad Medical Specialties

Medicine
Surgery
Emergency Medicine
General Practice
Paediatrics

Medical Subspecialties

Dermatology
Infectious diseases
Immunology
Nephrology
Orthopaedic surgery

My Work

Anti-microbial resistance is currently one of the major threats to global health and society. The WHO highlights the epidemic of antibiotic resistance in Staphylococcus aureus as a particular concern and strongly advocates for the development of an anti-S.aureus vaccine to counteract the epidemic of MRSA, currently a major burden on healthcare settings. Research in our lab is focused on understanding the host immune response to infection with Staphylococcus aureus. The application of this research is for vaccine development.

There is currently an acute unmet clinical need for an anti-S. aureus vaccine. Despite significant efforts all previous anti-S.aureus vaccines have failed in clinical trials and one of the key reasons for these failures is due to a lack of understanding of the correlates of immune protection i.e what mode of immunity needs to be induced by the vaccine to protect against infection. In particular there is a distinct lack of knowledge on how the immune system reacts to this organism in relevant patient cohorts ie those patients at particular risk from S.aureus infection e.g. Haemodialysis patients, surgical patients, patients with chronic inflammatory.

Our research suggests that a cellular immune response is required to provide effective protection against S.aureus infection and we have preliminary evidence that T-helper type 1 cells maybe particularly important in providing this protection (1). . However we need a better understanding of cellular immunity in relevant patient cohorts.

1. Brown et al., PlosPathogen 2015 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.ppat.1005226