James Gilchrist
MBioch, MBBS, MRCPCH, DPhil, PGDip Paediatric Infectious Diseases
Wellcome Career Development Fellow
- Principal Investigator
- Honorary Consultant in Paediatric Infectious Diseases & Immunology
Genetics & epigenetics of infection in childhood
I established my group within the Oxford Vaccine Group in 2025, supported by a Wellcome Career Development Award. Infection results in over 1.5 million childhood deaths in sub-Saharan Africa annually, and malaria alone causes 200 million episodes of clinical infection. We need better tools to control childhood infection but also a greater understanding of how repeated episodes of infection in childhood impact long-term health. Our group uses human genetic tools to better understand the causes and consequences of infection in childhood. Our work has two broad themes. Firstly, to understand why children develop invasive infection we use genome-wide association studies to map genetic variation associated with infection risk. We combine these studies with expression quantitative trait locus mapping in immune cells, in the context of infection, to understand the mechanisms through which genetic variation modifies infection risk. Secondly, we map epigenetic changes in immune cells to understand how childhood infection burden in turn modifies the epigenetic landscape and immune function. In doing so, we hope to understand whether repeated infection can modify risk of secondary infection in the short-term, but also whether childhood infection burden affects risk of non-communicable disease in adulthood. We address these questions in settings with a high burden of childhood infection, delivering our work through close collaborations with researchers in Uganda (MRC/UVRI & LSHTM Uganda Research Unit, Entebbe) and Kenya (KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Research Programme, Kilifi).
Recent publications
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Relation Between the Dantu Blood Group Variant and Bacteremia in Kenyan Children: A Population-Based Case-Control Study.
Kariuki SN. et al, (2025), J Infect Dis, 231, e10 - e16
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Altered IL-6 signalling and risk of tuberculosis: a multi-ancestry mendelian randomisation study.
Hamilton F. et al, (2025), Lancet Microbe, 6
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Defining the genetic determinants of CD8+T cell receptor repertoire in the context of immune checkpoint blockade
Ng ES. et al, (2024)
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Genetic determinants of monocyte splicing are enriched for disease susceptibility loci including for COVID-19
Fairfax B. et al, (2024)
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Characterization of the genetic determinants of context-specific DNA methylation in primary monocytes.
Gilchrist JJ. et al, (2024), Cell Genom, 4