Active Infection & Immunity Pregnancy, Children & Inherited Conditions

ShigAfriCoP: Unravelling immune signatures against Shigella to inform multivalent vaccine approaches

Funder Wellcome Charity-funded
Associated organisations Antigen Discovery Inc · University of Oxford Europe PMC affiliations are not treated as award recipients or mapped locations.
Funding £4.8M
Period Feb 2025 — Jan 2028

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

Every year, *Shigella* bacteria cause severe diarrhoea in millions of children across Africa and Asia, yet no vaccine exists to stop it. The problem is that researchers lack a clear biological signal—a "correlate of protection"—that tells them whether a vaccine candidate will actually work. Without this marker, vaccine development relies on expensive, slow human infection studies. This project aims to find that signal by analysing blood and stool samples from four distinct groups: Kenyan adults deliberately infected with *Shigella*; young children hospitalised with severe shigellosis in Zambia and Burkina Faso; healthy people of all ages in Burkina Faso and Kenya; and volunteers from two completed vaccine trials. If the team identifies a reliable immune signature, vaccine developers could screen candidates quickly and cheaply, without needing large field trials. A licensed *Shigella* vaccine would prevent hundreds of thousands of hospitalisations and deaths each year in low-income countries. It would also reduce the overuse of antibiotics for diarrhoea, slowing the spread of drug-resistant bacteria. The work is applied—it directly targets a regulatory bottleneck that has kept a vaccine out of reach for decades.

View original technical description
Shigella is the most common cause of diarrhoea among children in low-and- middle income countries (LMICs). However, there is no licenced vaccine and no definitive correlate(s) of protection to accelerate vaccine development. Individuals in LMICs are repeatedly exposed and develop immunity. Deliberate infection of adults in human infection studies (HIS) plays a key role in selecting vaccine candidates but has not yet been fully exploited to identify correlates of protection in the context of naturally acquired immunity. We will use existing samples and datasets in four work packages (WPs): WP1) Human infection studies (HIS) in (a) a Kenyan cohort of adults with prior exposure and (b) a vaccine-efficacy HIS study in the USA; WP2) longitudinal cohort of children under 5 years with severe shigellosis from Zambia and Burkina Faso; WP3) age-stratified, cross-sectional community survey samples from individuals in Burkina Faso and Kenya; and WP4) samples from two vaccine trials. This proposal is uniquely placed to identify and validate correlate(s) of protection by bringing together resources from HIS, studies of severe illness and community surveys, and vaccine trials to progress through discovery of correlates (WP1) and validation (WP2) to application for vulnerable populations (WP3) and testing immunity raised by vaccination (WP4).

View the original record at the funder ↗

Researchers

Daniel O'Connor (EPMC Awardee)Joseph Campo (EPMC Awardee)

Related Research

Grants with similar aims, by meaning.

Establishing Shigella Human Infection Studies in an endemic population in Kenya for evaluating Shigella vaccines
Characterising the aetiology and host immunity to diarrhoeal infections in Africa (CAHIDA)
Informing shigellosis treatment and management in resource-poor settings through pathogen genomics
GlycoShig3: age-descending phase 2a study into target population with the SF2a-TT15 synthetic carbohydrate-based vaccine
Human Infection Studies

Original classification

Identifying correlates of protection to support vaccine development

Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.