The Bhagirath Singh Early Career Award in Infection and Immunity 2024 Recipient

Amy Gillgrass

39 million people are living with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) (PLWH) worldwide and 10.6 million people a year develop active tuberculosis (TB) infections. Unfortunately, the areas with high levels of HIV overlap with high levels of TB. This can lead to what we call HIV/TB co-infections. 1/3 of all deaths from HIV are due to co-infection with TB. When you have both HIV and TB at the same time, this can lead rapid progression of both infections and ultimately leads to high likelihood of death. The exact reasons for this rapid disease progression and how to prevent it aren't known. It is challenging to study co-infection in humans as it is hard to know exact timepoints of infection or get tissue samples to see immune responses. HIV is an infection that targets and kills human immune cells and in TB, controlling the disease is dependent on the same human immune cells HIV targets. Thus, we know that human immune cells are important in the progression of co-infection. We have developed an improved humanized mouse model that can be infected with HIV and TB and will use this to determine why co-infection worsens disease. We will also test therapies that target immune responses in co-infection to improve disease outcomes. Ultimately, this project will allow us to understand how co-infection works, what immune responses are affected by co-infection and how we can target this to improve human health.

Date modified:

2026-02-26