Professor Warwick Britton AO
Head of Tuberculosis Research Program
Bosch Professor of Medicine, and Professor of Immunology, Sydney Medical School, University of Sydney
Consultant Physician, Department of Clinical Immunology, Royal Prince Alfred Hospital
Research Interests
Recently, he initiated new collaborative research programs in Vietnam on improving the control of tuberculosis and on immunogenetics of tuberculosis.
Achievements
Since 1997 his group has used an aerosol model of infection with virulent M. tuberculosis in a dedicated PC3 facility in the Centenary Institute. This has allowed them to analyse the cellular and cytokine control of M. tuberculosis infection in the lungs using genetically modified mice and to develop novel subunit and recombinant BCG vaccines to prevent infection with M. tuberculosis.
In addition, his group has identified a new secreted enzyme of M. tuberculosis, which is a novel target for drug development. Professor Britton has a longstanding research interest in the epidemiology and immunology of asthma and established a long-running cohort on childhood asthma in 1982.
