Sorry for having been a little quiet - it’s only because our BIO-004 clinical trial has finally started! Five years in the making, we couldn’t be more excited that our first 11 participants have received their yellow fever vaccination! Of course, we have their well-being at heart and supply them with a well-stocked snack box at all times. :) The Spence lab team has set-up camp in Oxford, processing blood like ninjas, and the first trial samples have already arrived back in Edinburgh. What a ride! We are still recruiting for our second group of 11 - so if you know someone who might be interested check out https://trials.ovg.ox.ac.uk/trials/bio-004.
Remarkably, while all of this was going on, Katharina, Matteo, and Jo still managed to go to the pub... well to Skeptics in the Pub. Watch them explain why we infect people with malaria to understand how the immune systems learns to tolerate malaria parasites.