Hyderabad, October 22: Typhoid may not be fatal but nearly six lakh of the 17 million getting infected with the disease are dying every year, according to Partha P Majumder, director of the National Institute of Biomedical Genomics (NIBG), Kolkata. He was one of the four scientists who were given TWAS (Academy of Sciences of Developing World formerly known as Third World Academy of Sciences) prizes on Tuesday for his research on diseases in the discipline of biology.
He gave a lecture on ‘Genomics of immune- response to a typhoid vaccine’ at the ongoing TWAS conference here today. Later, speaking to Express, he said the basic idea of the research was to find out why individuals respond differently to typhoid vaccine.
‘’We studied how the vaccine protects us against pathogens or microbes. The vaccine is like a replica of microbe.
The immune system gets alerted the moment the vaccine is injected into the body. But it doesn’t cause typhoid but prepares the immune system to tackle further microbe attacks,’’ he explained. The study considered parameters like sex, age, ethnicity and genetic background to find out whether any of them were responsible for the variation. ‘’We found that its genes which are responsible for the variation but not other factors. There are two kinds of genes, innate immunity genes which acts as gate-keepers and adaptive immunity genes which forms a part of inner defence system against microbe attack,’’ he said. In the words of Mazumder, microbes are like terrorists who attack gate-keepers triggering gunfire and in turn alerting adaptive immunity genes.
‘’We identified that only seven, including two of the 20 different innate immunity genes and five of the 300 adaptive immunity genes are responsible for individuals responding differently to typhoid vaccine,’’ he averred.
‘’The study recommended manufacturers to take these seven genes into account and accordingly modify vaccine to make it more effective,’’ he added.
Each dose of typhoid vaccine costs about `300 and should be taken every two years.
Human evolution and understanding ethnicity, human genetics are some of the research areas of Mazumder.
–Agencies