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February 22, 2006
Recent Recruit: Tobias R. Kollmann
CFRI extends a warm welcome to Dr. Tobias R. Kollmann (MD, PhD), who joined the Infectious & Inflammatory Diseases research program in September. Dr. Kollmann arrived from the University of Washington School of Medicine. He joins us as a clinician-scientist, and is an Assistant Professor in the UBC Department of Pediatrics, with a clinical appointment at BC Children’s Hospital. His major clinical interests include infections of the newborn. His research focuses on neonatal immunization.
Dr. Kollmann was born and raised in Germany. In the 1980s he visited Africa as a medical clerk. These trips changed his life, and mark the beginning of his interest in HIV, immunology, and vaccines. Following a sojourn at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, New York, where he received his MD and PhD (his PhD thesis was on developing animal models of HIV), he went on to pediatric residency training in Seattle. He returned to his interest in immunology and vaccines during his fellowship in Pediatric Infectious Diseases, which he also completed in Seattle.
“An estimated five million children die each year from vaccine-preventable diseases,” says Dr. Kollmann. He explains that in many African countries it is practically impossible to fully vaccinate all children according to the current guidelines. “However, most children are in contact with some form of medical personnel at birth, so I started wondering, why not start vaccinating then?”
Dr. Kollmann says that the prevailing assumption had been that neonatal vaccination couldn’t work because the newborn’s immune system is ‘too immature’. “The neonatal immune system is faced with an enormous task, and masters it very well – otherwise we all would not be here anymore. It cannot be immature. But it is different than the immune system of older children and adults. While trying to figure out this difference, using a bug called Listeria as a tool, we found something that works extremely well in the newborn”.
Last year Dr. Kollmann received a prestigious five-year Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award to study “Induction of protective immunity to Listeria in neonates.” His work focuses on genetically manipulating strains of Listeria to deliver vaccines and stimulate the immune response in neonates. “Listeria is relatively easy to work with, and is great for inducing protection from infection because of the unique way it stimulates the body’s defence system,” says Dr. Kollmann. His crew has built multiple stopgaps into the vaccine strains of Listeria so the bacteria do what they want it to do, and only that. Dr. Kollmann says they’ve successfully tried the technique in mice. “Newborn mice given one shot of this modified Listeria are protected from serious infection for the rest of their life – no boosters, nothing else needed. It’s beautiful!”
Over the next year Dr. Kollmann and his team will be setting up his lab and looking at diseases for which Listeria could be used as vaccine vehicle. Says Dr. Kollmann, “With the space, support and funding in place here at CFRI, I expect we’ll have several major breakthroughs. We know the basic mechanism works. We now just need to nail down the most pertinent human applications.” |
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