Journal of Vaccines & Vaccination

Chinnaswamy Jagannath

Chinnaswamy Jagannath
Professor, Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine
The University of Texas Health Science Center, USA

Biography

Chinnaswamy Jagannath is a professor of pediatrics in division of pediatric infectious diseases. He is also serves as assistant dean for academic and faculty affairs. He is peer reviewer of more than 35 articles.

Research Interest

The major focus of my laboratory is on vaccine development for tuberculosis. Tuberculosis is the leading cause of death due to infections in the world today and we are working on newer strategies to develop vaccines. We developed a novel gene knockout vaccine from Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) that protects mice better than BCG (Infection& Immunity, 2000, 2004). We propose to develop this ultimately into a candidate vaccine for humans. Although BCG is used a vaccine against tuberculosis in man, it does not offer long term protection. Parameters for long term immunity are uncertain. However, a key defect in development of better vaccine effect is that both BCG and wild type Mtb inhibit phagosome maturation, lysosomal degradation and processing of antigens through MHC pathway so that effective T cell responses are probably not induced. We have therefore developed novel hypotheses and mechanisms to address this issue.