We are thrilled to announce that this year’s winner of the Garnham prize is Dr. Daniel Ward. The Garnham prize is a prestigious award that recognizes the best overall PhD thesis in laboratory sciences within the LSHTM, each academic year. It is named after Professor Cyril Garnham, who was one of the UK’s foremost parasitologists in the 20th century, renowned for his outstanding achievements as both a laboratory scientist and a field worker in the tropics. Dr. Daniel Ward’s thesis covered the development of molecular and serological tools for infection outbreaks. Congratulations to Dan.

Professors Susana Campino and Taane Clark recently gave talks at the Ministry of Public Health in Thailand, with whom we have ongoing UKRI-funded projects in COVID-19 and TB. The talks focused on applications of our latest genomics tools in malaria parasites and vectors, TB and Klebsiella bacteria. Many thanks to Dr. Surakameth for hosting the LSHTM team. Staff from the Thailand Ministry of Health have visited the LSHTM for training, data generation and analysis in July 2022 and February/March 2023.

Human genome-wide association studies have failed so far to reveal reproducible susceptibility loci, attributed in part to the influence of the underlying Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacterial genotype on the outcome of the infection. In recent work by Jody et al, by implementing a phylogenetic tree-based analysis for 714 TB patients from Thailand, we identify eight putative genetic interaction points both linked to the IFNγ cytokine and host immune system. The genome-to-genome analysis reveals a complex interactome picture, supports host-pathogen adaptation and co-evolution in TB, and has potential applications to large-scale studies across many TB endemic populations