Medicine at the Crick | Stowaways: Emerging roles of not-so-acute infections in shaping human health, immunity, and evolution

Stowaways: Emerging roles of not-so-acute infections in shaping human health, immunity, and evolution

Our Medicine at the Crick event series showcases major advances in biomedical science and raises awareness of the medical implications of major scientific advances. Interested members of the Crick and wider UK biomedical community are invited to attend. Members of the academic medical press are also invited. Each event comprises a series of talks and a panel discussion, followed by networking for in person attendees.

More about the event

This 21st edition of Medicine at the Crick will be hosted by Dr David LV Bauer (The Francis Crick Institute) and Prof Emma Wall (The Francis Crick Institute and Queen Mary's University London).

Infection is conventionally framed as an acute event - an encounter, a response, a resolution. Yet many of the pathogens that matter most to human health are never fully cleared. Ebola virus can persist for years in immune-privileged sites of survivors, occasionally seeding new outbreaks; Salmonella Typhi can establish lifelong asymptomatic carriage in hosts who remain well while continuing to shed; pneumococcal colonisation persists alongside chronic mucosal inflammation that antiretroviral therapy does not resolve in some people living with HIV; SARS-CoV-2 can replicate for months in immunocompromised patients, accumulating the mutations that later define variants of concern; and hepatitis B can endure as cccDNA in the hepatocyte nucleus, the reservoir that keeps chronic infection from cure. Such infections blur the boundary between pathogen and passenger, and raise a shared question: what determines whether a host clears, tolerates, or is ultimately reshaped by what it cannot eliminate? This symposium will convene five international experts to examine persistence across viruses and bacteria, its mechanisms, and its consequences for immunity, transmission and evolution.