Anne Kapaata

Anne Kapaata started out as a laboratory technologist working on different collaborative research projects at the Medical Research Council/Uganda Virus Research Institute and London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (MRC/UVRI & LSHTM) Uganda research unit where she was mainly involved with sequencing of the HIV-1 virus to identify diversity and drug resistance viruses to aid in clinical management of those infected. For her MSc, she investigated HIV-1 subtype distribution and evidence of transmission clusters among incident cases in a rural clinical cohort in southwest Uganda. She has also examined the phenotypic and genotypic characteristics of the transmitted founder HIV-1 virus from recently infected Ugandans; investigated virus-host interactions early after transmission and how they impact the course of infection for her doctoral studies. These genetic and biological features of transmitted viruses are important because they carry the genetic footprint that allows infection in the new host, and therefore defines the virus that a vaccine must interdict. She continues her contribution to HIV-1 vaccine research by unravelling the unique signatures that make the transmitted founder virus able to establish an infection out of the many viruses present in the donor/ those chronically infected.