Abstract

How do pandemics happen, where do they come from, and how can we prevent them if we don’t know how, when and where? My laboratory studies some of the most notorious causes of high consequence epidemics, RNA viruses. How do these large families of diverse RNA viruses gain a foothold in the human population, and go from causing outbreaks, to epidemics to pandemics? Drawing from lessons from Ebola, Influenza and most recently Coronavirus, our research has demonstrated that surveillance data integrated with genomics of viruses with high-risk profiles can be used to make a new generation of vaccines. This talk will address the challenges of immunising the human population against unknown future threats.

Video recording available