Henry Mwandumba

Henry Charles Mwandumba is a Malawian Professor of Medicine and the Director of the Malawi-Liverpool-Wellcome Programme. He works on the tuberculosis phagosome in the University of Malawi College of Medicine, and serves as President of the Federation of African Immunological Societies. In 2019 Mwandumba was awarded the Royal Society Africa Prize.

Early life and education Mwandumba studied medicine at the University of Zimbabwe, and graduated with a Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery in 1990. He specialised in general practice and infectious diseases in Liverpool.

Research and career Mwandumba is based in Blantyre. He works with the Wellcome Trust and Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. He studies the impact of HIV and concurrent pulmonary infections, including Mycobacterium tuberculosis, on innate pulmonary immunity. In Sub-Saharan Africa, 80% of tuberculosis (TB) patients are co-infected with HIV, and TB is the leading cause of death in patients with HIV. The increased likelihood of suffering from TB at the same time as HIV implies that HIV changes the immune environment of the lung. Mwandumba looks to better understand the mechanisms behind susceptibility and resistance to TB in an effort to reduce the occurrence of HIV-associated TB. He is also involved with the development of new therapies for TB. Patients that take Antiretroviral Therapy (ART), a common treatment for HIV, are between 5 and 10 times more likely to also suffer from TB than non-HIV positive patients. He was the first to demonstrate that Mycobacterium TB stopped the progression of the endosomal–lysosomal system; implying that the lungs of patients that suffer from both TB and HIV are low in antimicrobial cytokines. Mwandumba uses fluorescence in situ hybridization to monitor HIV infected alveolar macrophages, which involves fluorescent probes that bind to RNA that are related to HIV. He works as an honorary consultant at the Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital in Malawi as well as at the Royal Liverpool University Hospital. Mwandumba has been involved with the Royal College of Physicians Malawi-Liverpool-Wellcome Physicians for Africa programme. In 2017 Mwandumba was awarded a Medical Research Council African Leader Award. In 2018 he was made deputy director of the Malawi-Liverpool-Wellcome Trust (MLW) research program, where he leads the Mucosal Immunology Group. As of November 2019, Mwandumba is President of the Federation of African Immunological Societies.

In 2019 Mwandumba was awarded the Royal Society Africa Prize.