Professor Godwin Nchinda
AfOx-Collaborative Fellow 2019
Research
Our focus is to develop vaccines that can easily be deployed against challenging and emergent infections in sub Saharan Africa. In the last 20 years we have focused mainly on dendritic cell targeted vaccine candidates against both HIV-1 and Malaria. However in the last three years we are equally optimizing the RNA Coliphage Qβ as a nano-biotechnology platform for directed evolutionary selection of immunogens and bio-probes. In this light recombinant Qβ phage particles bearing immunogens derived from a number of pathogens including HIV, Plasmodium falciparum, SARS-CoV-2, MERS , SARS-CoV-1 and the Lassa fever virus have been developed. Data on our HIV and Malaria displayed immunogens have already been published.
We are equally characterizing the immune system of people living in Sub Saharan Africa. We are also part of a consortium for pathogen genomic characterization of emerging and re-emerging pathogens like the COVID19 virus. We are also involved with biobanking.