Accelerating vaccine development

Adrian Hill trained at Trinity College Dublin and Oxford is now Professor of Human Genetics and Director of the Jenner Institute at Oxford University. He leads research programmes in genetic susceptibility to tropical infectious diseases and in vaccine design and development.

As a founder member of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics since 1994 his research group has studied multiple genetic factors associated with or genetically linked to resistance to malaria, tuberculosis, bacterial pneumonia, and viral infections such as hepatitis B and C and HIV. His group has pioneered genome-wide linkage and association analyses of genetic susceptibility to common human infectious diseases, particularly tuberculosis, more recently as part of the Wellcome Trust case control consortium. Data on immunogenetic susceptibility factors have provided new insights into the impact of infections on human genomic diversity. 

He has published over 350 research papers, is a Fellow of the UK Academy of Medical Sciences and the Royal College of Physicians, and a NIHR Senior Investigator.

Brian Greenwood qualified in medicine at the University of Cambridge, UK in 1962. Following house-officer appointments in London, he spent 3 years in Western Nigeria as a medical registrar and research fellow at University College Hospital, Ibadan. After receiving training in clinical immunology in the UK, he returned to Nigeria in 1970, this time to help in establishing a new medical school at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria where he developed his research interests in malaria and meningococcal disease whilst continuing to teach and practice both adult and paediatric medicine.

In 1980, he moved to the UK Medical Research Council Laboratories in The Gambia which he directed for the next 15 years. In The Gambia, he helped to establish a multi-disciplinary research programme which focused on some of the most important infectious diseases prevalent in The Gambia and neighbouring countries such as malaria, pneumonia, measles, meningitis, hepatitis and HIV2. Work undertaken during this period included demonstration of the efficacy of insecticide treated bednets in preventing death from malaria in African children and demonstration of the impact of Haemophilusinfluenzae type b and pneumococcal conjugate vaccines when deployed in sub-Saharan Africa.

In 1996, he was appointed to the staff of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine where he is now Manson Professor of Clinical Tropical Medicine. From 2001 -2008 he directed the Gates Malaria Partnership which supported a programme of research and capacity development in many countries in Africa directed at improving treatment and prevention of malaria. In 2008, he became director of a new malaria research capacity development initiative, supported by the Wellcome Trust and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Malaria Capacity Development Consortium, which supports a post-graduate malaria training programme in five universities in sub-Saharan Africa. He is also director of a new consortium which is studying the epidemiology of meningococcal infection in Africa prior to the introduction of a new conjugate vaccine.

Brian Greenwood has published over 600 papers on a variety of infectious diseases but particularly malaria. He has acted as an advisor to WHO, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a number of public private partnerships and pharmaceutical companies engaged in the development of drugs or vaccines for use in the developing world.