Dr Sarah Jackson

I work on understanding how T cells recognise and control cytomegalovirus infection in the research group of Dr Mark Wills (Division of Infectious Disease, Department of Medicine).  Human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) is a persistent virus which undergoes intermittent reactivation in tissues with shedding of infectious virus in body fluids.  Despite the exposure of the virus to the immune response during initial infection and subsequent reactivation events the virus is not cleared from infected people.  Lifelong infection with HCMV does not usually cause overt disease, however it causes significant problems for people with compromised or immature immune systems, such as HIV/AIDS patients, transplant patients or unborn babies.  

We have shown that there are T cell responses to viral proteins encoded during cytomegalovirus latency and part of my current research is discovering whether these T cell populations are able to target a specific immune response against latently infected cells to help to clear the virus from infected people.  We are also interested in investigating whether there are changes to the immune response against HCMV antigens with increasing donor age.  So far we have shown that the breadth and quality of the T cell response against HCMV is not affected by donor age in a small cohort of healthy donors.  We are now expanding these observations and also asking whether the response to latent associated viral proteins are altered in older donors by examining a larger number of donors in association with the Cambridge BioResource.