Finding out about helminths: Professor Nicola Harris

Professor Nicola Harris is a co-organiser of the forthcoming
(8-12 Dec 2019) conference dedicated to helminths

Adapted from Keystone Symposia on Molecular and Cellular Biology

“Helminths are perhaps the most successful parasites on the planet,” says Professor Nicola Harris, co-organizer of the upcoming (8-12 Dec 2019) Keystone Symposia on “Helminths: New insights from immunity to global health.”

Prof Harris says that helminths have co-evolved with humans and still today cause chronic and near-ubiquitous infections amongst populations living in endemic regions without access to adequate sanitation.

Prof Harris shares insights about how these masters of immune evasion manipulate the immune systems of their hosts.  Prof Harris will be joining other global research leaders in Cape Town, South Africa, to discuss the latest advances in helminth biology, vaccination strategies, and implications for autoimmune disease treatments.

"Paradoxically the elimination of helminths from large parts of the developed world through improved sanitation has occurred alongside the emergence of obesity, diabetes and a range of allergic and inflammatory conditions. It is my belief that understanding, and actively investigating, helminth biology and helminth-host interactions has the potential to deliver insight into a little-understood facet of human health thus improving the lives of not thousands but millions of individuals from all corners of the planet."

Prof Harris is a laboratory head and NHMRC research fellow in the Department of Immunology and Pathology at the Central Clinical School of Monash University, Australia.

Her laboratory studies type two immune responses with a particular focus on understanding their role in immune protection, physiology and wound repair/tissue regeneration both in health and following intestinal helminth infection.  Research projects fall into two main categories:

• The first investigates how to prevent damage inflicted by intestinal helminth infection (nutrient malabsorption, growth retardation, anemia)
• The second investigates the well-described link between intestinal helminth infection and protection against so-called ‘western’ diseases such as allergy, inflammatory bowel disease, autoimmunity and obesity (metabolic syndrome).