Fatoumatta Darboe

Fatoumatta Darboe

Dr Fatoumatta Darboe

MRC Unit at LSHTM, The Gambia

TB Biomarkers: Diagnosis, prognosis, treatment response monitoring

 

Poster Abstract

I am a recent PhD graduate from the University of Cape Town with the South African Tuberculosis Vaccine Initiative. I enrolled into the PhD programme in 2015 and graduated in December of 2018. Prior to this, I studied the immune response and other heterologous responses to BCG vaccine in a cohort of infants who received BCG either at birth or at 18 weeks of age. We observed no effect of BCG vaccination on innate or Th2 cytokine responses and no effect of BCG vaccination on EPI antibody levels at the study timepoints. These suggest that there is minimal early heterologous immune modulation by BCG Russia vaccination, but this did not persist 12 weeks after vaccination.

From my PhD work, we observed that risk signatures of TB disease could identify active TB patients from healthy Mtb infected adults in the presence or absence of HIV infection. We could monitor TB treatment response and predict recurrent TB disease (albeit at a shorter time-window prior to diagnosis in comparison to HIB-uninfected persons), in HIV-infected persons on long-term antiretroviral therapy.

I’m interested in developing and identifying biomarkers as tools for triage tests and vaccine development especially in the presence of HIV infection. Furthermore, I’m interested in the immune mechanisms underlying progression and resistance to TB disease. As part of the VALIDATE network, I’m interested in building collaborations to develop small, cost-effective biomarkers to differentiate the stages of TB disease.

 

Biography

Fatoumatta completed her undergraduate studies at the University of The Gambia where she studied for a double major in Biology and Chemistry. Upon graduation, she joined the Medical Research Council The Gambia unit where she worked in various positions in the infant immunology lab from 2010 to 2014. During this time, she enrolled for a part-time MPhil at the Open University (UK) which she successfully completed within two years of enrolment. She later joined the South African Tuberculosis Vaccines initiatives as a PhD student in 2015. Her PhD focused on the use of transcriptomic signatures of TB risk in people living with HIV. She is now a postdoctoral researcher at the MRC unit The Gambia at LSHTM, where she is continuing her work on TB. Her main interests lie in biomarker development for TB disease and TB in people living with HIV.