Each year, the Lasker Foundation invites early career researchers to discuss big questions in biomedical research, with the aim of improving skills to communicate to a wide range of audiences. This year applicants were asked to 'Identify a specific unmet need in biomedical knowledge or a scientific question that is insufficiently addressed in biomedical research today'.
Dr Subashan Vadibeler, a recent Oxford Rhodes scholar and MRes student who is supervised by by Assoc. Prof. Eileen Parkes and Prof. Tim Elliott, was one of five winners this year, receiving a $5000 stipend and the publication of his essay in The Journal of Clinical Investigation.
Commenting on the award, Subashan said:
I spent 5 years training in medicine in urban and suburban settings of Malaysia's capital city, Kuala Lumpur where dengue is a disease with a huge disease burden. There was no escape from knowing the immunological basis behind the disease presentation, and it was frustrating that we have very little targeted intervention to offer for patients, mainly restricted by our limited understanding of the disease mechanism.
When I moved to Oxford to study immunology, I only became more interested in how viruses (and later, tumours) have evolved to evade our immune system in fascinating ways, with devastating consequences. I began to see the underlying immunological mechanism of severe dengue in everything I stumbled upon, including COVID-19 treatment/vaccines, cancer vaccines and immunotherapy. So, when Lasker Foundation this year asked about a question that is insufficiently addressed by the scientific community, the answer was all to clear to me: antibody-dependent enhancement.
I am currently back in clinical practice, under the academic clinical training pathway, and I am very grateful to know that my research ideas born from clinical observation/experience is valued. Above that, I am grateful for the platform that this prize offers me, to share about a disease mechanism that has far-reaching significance that not everyone who has not been to the tropics has had the opportunity to witness first-hand. It is also a wonderful opportunity to share this in person later this year at the Lasker Award Ceremony in New York (my first time visiting the country).
His essay, entitled 'The (unresolved) antibody paradox', discusses why prior infection doesn't always result in immune protection against re-infection, and can even make reinfection worse (so-called 'antibody-dependent enhancement'). Read Subashan's essay here.