MAGY — adolescent girls and young women in East Africa
- Lab
- McKinnon Lab, University of Manitoba
- Period
- 2024 — Present
- Role
- Vaginal microbiome bioinformatics
- Collaborators
- Partner institutions and investigators in Uganda, Zambia, Kenya and South Africa
- Methods
- 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing · Microbiome data processing · R
MAGY is a multi-site study of HIV vaccines and antibody-based prevention among adolescent girls and young women — the group that carries the highest incidence of new HIV infection in sub-Saharan Africa, and the group for whom prevention has been hardest to deliver.
The genital microbial environment matters here for a concrete reason: genital inflammation and community composition affect both susceptibility and the mucosal conditions any prevention product has to work in.
What I do on it
I am responsible for the vaginal microbiome bioinformatics and analysis across the study, working with investigators and partner organisations in Uganda, Zambia, Kenya and South Africa.
A baseline epidemiology manuscript — covering sexually transmitted infections, genital inflammation, and vaginal microbiome composition across the cohort — is in preparation, with at least one further manuscript planned.