CIR Seminar: How vaccines train the immune system in ways no one expected

Title: How vaccines train the immune system in ways no one expected

Speaker: Professor Christine Stabell Benn

Biography: 

Christine Stabell Benn MD, PhD, DMSc, is Professor in Global Health at University of Southern Denmark, and has worked at the Bandim Health Project in Guinea-Bissau since 1993. Her research focuses on epidemiological studies of how vaccines and vitamins affect the immune system in more general ways than previously thought, included sex-specific effects.

She is a terrific speaker and is doing some provocative research, based primarily in one of the world’s poorest countries, Guinea-Bissau, on the non-specific impact of vaccines on all cause mortality and immune training, in particular looking at the non-specific protection from live attenuated strain vaccines.

In addition to taking the observations on non-specific effects forward to randomised controlled trials, she has also bridged to immunological studies on innate immune training to explore the biological mechanisms underlying the non-specific effects of vaccines.