Dr Munyaradzi Musvosvi joins CIDRI-Africa

Munya joined the CIDRI-Africa team of Contributing Investigators in the second quarter of 2024. He is a research officer at the South African TB Vaccine Initiative and current Crick Africa Network Career Acceleration Fellow. He works at the interface of basic and clinical science to determine immune factors associated with risk of developing disease that will inform TB vaccine and biomarker design.

As part of his postgraduate project, Munya developed class-II tetramers to study the transcriptomic profiles of Ag85B and ESAT-6-specific CD4 T cells before and after vaccination with an Ag85B and ESAT-6 containing vaccine, H1:IC31. The team showed that in healthy persons with latent Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection, Ag85B-specific CD4 T cells had a less differentiated phenotype, while ESAT-6-specific CD4 T cells were more differentiated. This difference appeared to be driven by the differential expression of Ag85B and ESAT-6 by M. tuberculosis during infection. The team derived a “functional differential score” (FDS) based on Th1 cytokine profile; the FDS has been used by other investigators to assess the T cell response induced by candidate TB subunit vaccines at the pre-clinical stage. 

As a postdoctoral fellow Munya led a project that identified T cell clonotypes enriched in latently infected persons who control infection (controllers) or enriched in persons who progress to active disease (progressors). The team identified the cognate epitopes/antigens for some of the clonotypes and he is now involved in efforts to incorporate these antigens into candidate TB vaccines.

The importance of Munya’s work has been recognised through the award of multiple prestigious grants including Carnegie-funded fellowships for both his PhD and postdoctoral studies, a VALIDATE pump-priming award, a grant from the South African Medical Research Council, the 2021 Grand Challenges Annual Meeting Call-to-Action grant and his Crick Africa Network (CAN) Career Acceleration Fellowship.

Munya holds a BSc (2008), BSc(Hons) (2009), MSc (upgraded to PhD) and PhD (2015) from the University of Cape Town.