Abstract: Streptococcus pneumoniae is a common coloniser of the upper respiratory tract, but infections and inflammation occurs after dissemination into the lungs causing pneumonia, and invasive pneumococcal disease occurs following dissemination into the bloodstream causing septicaemia and across the blood brain barrier causing meningitis. The pneumococcus claims over 800,000 lives per year, primarily in the under 5 yrs and over 65 yrs, with the highest burden in Africa and South East Asia. Control of carriage is clearly an important factor in preventing advancement to invasive disease and transmission. There are over 100 serotypes and although the pneumococcal vaccines have been very successful in decreasing invasive disease, they have had little effect on carriage, particularly because of serotype replacement of the non-vaccine serotypes. Bacterial association with the nasal epithelium and epithelial-derived innate immunity is likely to be important for the outcome of pneumococcal colonisation. Using a combination of in vivo datasets, in vitro cell assays and the unique Experimental Human Pneumococcal Challenge model, we have been investigating pneumococcal-epithelial interactions in order to understand the cellular and molecular dynamics during infection.

Biography: Caroline received her PhD from the Institute of Food Research and the University of East Anglia working on the infection mechanisms of Toxoplasma gondii in the small intestine. She undertook her first postdoctoral position at Emory University, Atlanta USA investigating tight junction protein signalling in the context of Inflammatory Bowel Disease. Following on, she translated her signalling work experience to T cell biology at Lund University in Sweden. Now Caroline works at UCL in Rob Heydermans group as a senior research fellow, focussing on the colonisation of Streptococcus pneumoniae by the human nasopharyngeal epithelium. She is lead principal investigator on a number of project grants which are aimed at advancing the complexity of the systems she uses to investigate host-pathogen interactions.