Translation of Leish@york research

The major focus of the work will be on Cutaneous Leishmaniasis (CL), a disfiguring infectious disease caused by Leishmania parasites, that affects 20,000 people/year in Brazil. Drug treatments for CL are very poor and disease outcomes have been shown to be dependent on both host and parasite factors, however mechanistic details are unknown. The COVID pandemic showed that rapid genome surveillance and treatment developments (as well as political factors) mitigate epidemic harms. The first strand of our work aims to apply lessons learnt with SARS-Cov-2 viral surveillance to CL in Brazil; to achieve this we will apply microbiopsy technology and new sequencing and computational tools. The second will use the latest Oxford viral vector for developing a vaccine for CL, to be tested in collaboration with Brazilian colleagues in Fiocruz. The third will extend our collaborative drug discovery efforts with Novartis (US) and the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC, Brazil) on deubiquitinases as drug targets