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UCT RESEARCH REPORT 2012
Building Capacity in
Bioinformatics and
Computational Biology
In 2012 Associate Professor
Nicola Mulder
and
Dr
Darren Martin
from the Computational Biology (CBIO)
Group at the IIDMM together published 27 papers or
chapters in the international peer-reviewed literature.
Tackling Critical Questions
in HIV Prevention and
Pathogenesis
In 2012, Professor
Carolyn Williamson
(HIV Diversity and
Pathogenesis Group) and Associate Professor
Jo-Ann
Passmore
(HIV Mucosal Immunology Group) together
published 20 papers in international peer-reviewed journals
and one book chapter focusing on HIV prevention and
pathogenesis.
Research Projects
These papers covered a remarkable diversity
of topics, from the development of advanced
computational methods for analysing bacterial and
viral protein and nucleic acid interaction networks
to the application of these and other computational
tools to detailed analyses of many of Africa’s
most prevalent infectious diseases. While the
foundation of CBIO’s research strategy has been
the development of extensive networks of local and
international collaborators (many of whom work
at the cutting edge of either infectious disease or
computational biology research), its success has
been primarily based on the training and excellent
work of a constant stream of top master’s and PhD
students and postdoctoral research fellows from
across Africa. A particular highlight for the group
in 2012 that enables this is the award to Associate
Professor Mulder of a $12-million NIH-funded
Human Heredity and Health in Africa (H3Africa)
grant aimed at nurturing and growing computational
biology-based research collaboration and student
training networks across Africa. The CBIO group is
co-ordinating bioinformatics groups in more than 30
institutions across 15 African countries through the
H3ABioNet project. (Also see page 65.)
A highlight was a paper in
Nature Medicine
which
demonstrated that HIV mutation, in an attempt to avoid
host immune detection, was required for the evolution
of potent HIV-specific broadly cross-neutralising
antibodies. Understanding how to elicit broadly
cross-neutralising antibodies though vaccination is a
major question in Professor Williamson’s field and her
laboratory played a leading role in this discovery. She
and Associate Professor Passmore also co-authored two
important studies in the
Journal of Infectious Diseases
highlighting the failure of the syndromic management
approach to adequately treat sexually transmitted
infections in women in communities with high HIV
incidence rates. After the acquisition of HIV, genital
inflammation remained a significant predictor of worse
clinical HIV disease outcome. In recognition of their
notable track record in mucosal immunology and HIV
transmission, Professor Williamson, Associate Professor
Passmore and four other members of the IIDMM were
awarded a competitive R5-million EDCTP Strategic
Primer grant aimed at bringing together a multicentred
mucosal immunology consortium of investigators
committed to establishing scarce skills capacity for
mucosal research surrounding HIV prevention trial sites
in South Africa.