So my name is Dr Sophie Yacoub, I'm the head of dengue research
at the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit in Vietnam.
My area of research is on dengue. Dengue is a viral infection that is spread by mosquitoes,
Aedes mosquitoes which are day-biting mosquitoes.
Dengue causes a self-limiting viral infection where people have high fever and feel
like body aches and headaches for about seven days,
most people recover but a minority can go on to get severe disease which can be life-threatening.
To improve clinical outcomes in dengue are first of all to identify patients earlier
who are at high risk of developing severe disease, also being able to monitor patients more closely
and developing potential therapeutics because there are currently no drugs to treat dengue with.
So an exciting area of research that's just starting in OUCRU is using innovative technology
to monitor patients with dengue and predict those who will go on to get severe disease,
and we're using innovative bioengineering devices working with groups in Imperial
College London, King’s College London and Oxford University to develop wearable devices
and then use the information from those to support clinical decision support systems
to see if we can improve on how we can predict patients who will go on to get severe disease.
There have been a number of important discoveries in the past five to ten years,
some include understanding the immunology underlying why some patients get severe disease.
And also improving vaccines: so we have one vaccine that's licensed for dengue however
that's only effective in patients who have already seen one of the dengue serotypes of
which there are four, so there are different vaccines in the pipeline.
Also there's quite an exciting area of research that's being done by the World
Mosquito Program using Wolbachia, which is a bacterium that infects
insects and when you put it into the Aedes mosquito, it can block dengue viral transmission;
so that's quite an exciting area of research and also the innovative technologies that
we're developing in OUCRU, I think will be an exciting area for the next five years.
So the area of research matters not only for Vietnam but also globally,
dengue is continuing to expand across the globe and there are about 100 million infections
a year around the world and this is increasing.
It's predicted that with climate change even more countries can become endemic so it is a
huge problem for public health systems around the world not only in Southeast Asia but globally.
So I think it's important to invest in this area of research because currently we don't have
any particular therapies or an effective vaccine and there's a huge gap in how we can actually
make things better for patients with dengue and control the infection.
So all the work that we do in the dengue group at OUCRU is translational, so from understanding
the biological mechanisms of severe disease and then targeting that using different therapies,
and also some of the innovative technology that I mentioned using what we know
from bioengineering and other areas of medicine and applying that to dengue which is
in effect a neglected tropical disease so all the work that we do is very much translatable.