Dr Lorna Gcanga [University of Cape Town]

Host: Dr Sabelow [University of Cape Town and South African Immunology Society]

Dr Gcanga is a Postdoc hosted by the Brombacher and Guler Lab based at the Division of Immunology, University of Cape Town and ICGEB (Cape Town Component). She completed her BSc and MSc at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) in Parasitology. She then moved to the University of Cape Town where she completed her doctorate in immunology.

During her PhD she completed an internship at the Riken Center for Integrative Medical Sciences (Yokohama, Japan). This internship came with a great opportunity of learning new and exciting lab techniques which were applied in her PhD research. She has been awareded travel grants to present her work on conferences and workshops on non-coding RNA therapeutics and RNA transcriptomics.

Her work focuses on targeting non-coding RNAs that are subverted by Mycobacterium Tuberculosis to increase its persistence and survival within macrophages with the aim of developing host-directed drug therapy for Tuberculosis (Gcanga et al., 2022 Tamgue et al., 2019). Her current projects include the identification of host non-coding RNAs as host-directed drug therapy for TB and the role of epigenetics in host immunity to TB. This research is supported by the National Institutes of Health.