Publications by authors named "John-Paul Matlam"

Article Synopsis
  • - Acute lower respiratory tract infection (ALRI) is a leading cause of child mortality globally, particularly affecting children in Papua New Guinea (PNG) due to Streptococcus pneumoniae.
  • - Researchers conducted whole-exome sequencing on children in PNG and found a specific genetic variant (a single-nucleotide variant in the COQ6 gene) that is linked to higher morbidity from ALRI, with evidence from both human and mouse studies supporting its role.
  • - The COQ6 variant plays a significant role in the biosynthesis of ubiquinone and impacts how the immune system responds to infections, highlighting a new genetic risk factor for pneumonia in PNG and the enzyme's involvement in inflammatory responses.
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Background: Maternal immunization with pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV) may protect young infants in high-risk settings against the high risk of pneumococcal infections in early life. The aim of this study was to determine the safety and immunogenicity of 13-valent PCV (PCV13) in healthy women of childbearing age in PNG.

Methods: As part of this observational study, 50 non-pregnant women of childbearing age (18-45 yrs.

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Systems biology can unravel complex biology but has not been extensively applied to human newborns, a group highly vulnerable to a wide range of diseases. We optimized methods to extract transcriptomic, proteomic, metabolomic, cytokine/chemokine, and single cell immune phenotyping data from <1 ml of blood, a volume readily obtained from newborns. Indexing to baseline and applying innovative integrative computational methods reveals dramatic changes along a remarkably stable developmental trajectory over the first week of life.

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