Nationality: British
Position: Professor of Infectious Diseases, Faculty of Medicine Imperial College London
Research Fields: Human respiratory viral infection
Chris Chiu is an Infectious Diseases physician and Immunologist. He underwent his basic medical training at Cambridge and Oxford Universities, and was later awarded a Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Training fellowship to undertake a PhD with Charles Bangham and Margaret Callan, initially at the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine (University of Oxford) and then at Imperial College London, to show the transcriptional programming of early CD8 T cell responses to acute viral infection. On completion of his specialist training, he was awarded an MRC Clinician Scientist fellowship and furthered his research by working with Rafi Ahmed's group at Emory University, examining antibody, B cell and T cell responses to influenza and varicella zoster virus vaccines.
His research interests focus on pathogenesis and protective immunity in human respiratory viral infections, including respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), influenza and SARS-CoV-2. These are some of the most important causes of severe disease worldwide and there is an urgent need for improved vaccines and treatments for these pathogens. To discover why some people suffer life-threatening illness while others have only mild or asymptomatic infection, he has developed a set of unique experimental medicine techniques. He is an expert in human infection challenge studies and leads a group that uses infection and vaccination of volunteers as well as patient-centred research to investigate systemic and mucosal immunity against these infections. These highly specialised methods provide a unique opportunity to examine correlates and mechanisms of protection and disease severity in human beings. The work encompasses early phase clinical vaccine trials as well as fundamental studies of human immunity, which together enhance our understanding of how respiratory viral illnesses may be prevented and accelerate the development of better vaccines.
Prof Chiu also heads the Imperial Network for Vaccine Research, which brings together investigators from across all faculties with an interest in vaccines, and is Scientific and Research Officer of the British Infection Association. His group is part of a number of international consortia, including the NIAID CIVICs programme and European Union IMI projects, and welcomes collaboration with researchers (both industry and academic) who wish to work together to pursue their shared interests.
