From knowing the worst face of HIV up close to searching for the secret code of human immunity

The incontrovertible fact that her uncle contracted HIV and died from the problems of the an infection when she was nonetheless finding out biology at college lastly pushed Gemma Moncunill (Barcelona, 1981) to need to dedicate herself to the analysis of the immune system and infectious ailments. “I had always been fascinated by the complexity with which the body was capable of defending itself, or how vaccines could train defense cells”, recollects this researcher, with a beneficiant smile and glowing eyes.

At house, that they had all the time fueled her voracious, unquenchable curiosity about the world round her. As a toddler, on lengthy automotive journeys to the Vall d’Aran, the place they used to spend holidays and weekends, Moncunill would sit in the entrance together with her father and by no means cease asking him questions. “Dad, how does this and that machine work? What is nuclear fusion? Do androids dream of electric sheep?” And her father, patiently, would reply every thing he knew.

“At 18, I was already very clear that I wanted to dedicate myself to research. Surely, I had a cinematic vision: that I would save half the planet or find a cure for some deadly disease”, Moncunill recollects, laughing, and provides: “Perhaps I didn’t really know what research was, but I had the motivation to understand, to solve complex problems, and from there build something”.

This motivation is the engine that has led this researcher, one of the star signings of the Caixa Research Institute –the first analysis middle specializing in immunology in the Iberian Peninsula and one of the few in the world, which has simply began working in Barcelona– to make pivotal contributions to understanding how the physique learns to defend itself from infections. Now, Moncunill leads a analysis group with which she’s going to strive to reply how to practice the immune system in order that it protects us higher. And, finally, to map an immense and nonetheless little-known territory reminiscent of the functioning of human immunity.

Deeply concerned in household historical past, she started by scrutinizing the AIDS virus. However, she felt that at the time that analysis was too targeted on high-income international locations and never sufficient on serving to lower-income international locations, the place not solely HIV, but in addition malaria and different ailments that all the time go hand in hand with poverty, prey on younger kids and pregnant ladies. As a researcher at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), she labored in Mozambique and collaborated with different sub-Saharan international locations the place malaria is endemic throughout the rollout of the RTS,S vaccine to perceive why it protected and why it did so so in another way.

“Vaccines designed in Europe and the United States, where genetics and environmental exposures are very different, do not work as well in Africa,” Moncunill factors out. “And they are even less effective in children, because they have an immune system still under development, very different from that of adults, which responds differently,” she highlights, whereas recalling that “there are no resources dedicated to this disease, and this is crucial, because to advance in science considerable resources are needed in a sustained way.”

The problem now, she considers, is to incorporate the large evaluation of organic knowledge to perceive the international habits of the immune system and thus give you the chance to reply questions reminiscent of why some individuals develop safety and others don’t, and the way we are able to use this data to design simpler and exact vaccines that generate a long-term immune response. “There are vaccines that work extremely well, such as the human papillomavirus vaccine. My goal is to find the mechanisms to understand why some of these drugs work so well and be able to reproduce them so that all vaccines work just as well,” she says.

Gemma Moncunill’s household photograph

This immunologist reveals {a photograph} the place she seems in the foreground when she can be not more than two or three years previous. Behind her are her aunt and uncle, each already unwell with AIDS at the time. This researcher recollects how, when she was nonetheless very younger, she first noticed her aunt die. And years later, her uncle died from problems associated to HIV and from the many adversarial results that antiretrovirals had at the time. “Personal involvement was my driving force, it made me want more than anyone else to go through that. I wanted to solve it.”