Priority Research Area Infections
Coinfection
Mission 
Projects Funding Techniques Publications Staff
Mission
Multi-species coinfections pose one of the greatest challenges to global health. The Coinfection Junior research group is interested in the within-host interactions between different coinfecting pathogens and uses experimental models to study disease outcome and vaccination in the context of coinfection. Our main focus is to investigate how concurrent parasitic or viral infections impact on the pathogenesis and immune control of tuberculosis. In addition, we study the role of the biological sex in Tb. Disease rates are significantly higher in men than in women, reflected by a male-to-female ratio for worldwide case notifications of 1.8. Despite the well-known gender bias in human pulmonary Tb, a majority of experimental animal studies either do not separate and analyze data by sex or do not report the sex of their subjects at all. Consequently, there is clearly a lack of information on the role of biological sex in Tb. We use mouse infection models that reflect the epidemiological observations for the analysis of the molecular basis of sex-dependency in Tb disease outcome.