24 April 2019, Charlottesville: GIDI Spring Symposium

[Daniel-Mietchen]

as per https://twitter.com/GIDIuva/status/1075008121557393408 . Details forthcoming.

[Daniel-Mietchen]

Program skeleton: https://gidi.virginia.edu/2019-gidi-symposium

Registration now open: https://gidi.virginia.edu/2019-gidi-symposium-registration-form . I just registered.

[Daniel-Mietchen]

Apparently, there was a Zika brewing session in November 2018. Need to find out details.

[Daniel-Mietchen]

Now lightning talks (none of the slides are available)

• Shiwei Liu on single-parasite sequencing to address antimalarial resistence
  • background: https://gidi.virginia.edu/shiwei-liu-gidi-igrant-fellow

[Daniel-Mietchen]

• Nathan Swami on technical approaches to rapid antibiotic susceptibility assessment, i.e. quick and sensitive ways to distinguish between strains that are resistant versus those that are not
  • background: https://engineering.virginia.edu/faculty/nathan-swami
  • single-bacteria analyses
  • microfluidics
  • basic idea is to pick up electrical signals from certain quorum sensing metabolites in Pseudomonas aeruginosa

[Daniel-Mietchen]

• Molly Hughes on multidrug-resistant bacteria and antimicrobial chemokine peptides
  • notes the ESKAPE pathogens

[Daniel-Mietchen]

• (missed the name; probably Tania Thomas, as per this page on 2018 iGrants) on childhood tuberculosis
• Lipoarabinomannan(LAM) as a TB biomarker
• using Nanotrap for early detection of LAM in urine
• will be tested in a dataset of urine samples from Pakistan
• they have research sites elsewhere, e.g. Bangladesh and Philippines

[Daniel-Mietchen]

• Christina Pierre on using social media for tracking cervical cancer in Trinidad and Tobago, a relatively high-income country
• cervical cancer is preventable through early testing (pap smears) and/ or vaccination
• both prevention options are available for free in Trinidad and Tobago but cervical cancer rate is second-highest in the Caribbean (after Haiti)
• ran an ad for 2 days on Facebook and Instagram, had 33k impressions there, half of which clicked on the ad (20k watched all of the ad video), of which 358 registered ($0.08 per registration), of which 49 showed up to a screening event (1.93 $ per screen per person).

[Daniel-Mietchen]

Richard Karl Deang, anthropologist on peer counseling around HIV prevention

• field study from Manila
• Philippines are the country with the fastest growth rate of HIV infections
• military leader is on a crusade/ "holocaust" against recreational drug use

[Daniel-Mietchen]

• Chris Moore on sepsis in Sub-Saharan Africa
  • TB is leading cause of sepsis in the region
  • WHO recommends antibiotic treatment first, then anti-TB treatment
• they found that starting with anti-TB treatment has better outcomes
• ATLAS trial (not sure whether that's the same as this one) in Uganda and Tanzania
• work ongoing to change WHO policy
• mentions Eric Houpt and Scott Heysel in acknowlegements

[Daniel-Mietchen]

Now Peter Kasson on cases where moderate pre-existing immunity can worsen outcomes due to cross-reactions, e.g. between Zika and Dengue

• wants to measure cross-protection and identify broadly neutralizing antibodies
• enabling technology: DNA capture
• combining this with microfluidics
• testing with influenza

[Daniel-Mietchen]

Scholia profiles updated:

• https://tools.wmflabs.org/scholia/topic/Q905754 (quorum sensing)
• https://tools.wmflabs.org/scholia/Q6556678 (lipoarabinomannan)

[Daniel-Mietchen]

Missing from the first round of lightning talks: Volkan Koseoglu on the extracellular lifestyle of an intracellular pathogen

[Daniel-Mietchen]

Coffee break

[Daniel-Mietchen]

Now onto the keynote by Carolyn Reynolds, a UVA alumna: What the World (Still) Needs to Do to Prevent the Next Pandemic

• starts with a reference to the 1918 Influenza pandemic, then the 2014ff Ebola one
• reference to articles about lessons learned from the "preventable" Ebola outbreak
  • collectively, the ones she analyzed made more than 250 recommendations
• lots of verbal references to GDP, costs and losses with respect to the outbreak
• multiple mentions of lack of data sharing, and growing awareness around that

Now her priorities derived from those experiences:

1. Ensure each country is prepared for disease outbreaks
2. Invest in community preparedness (and not just during an outbreak, when there is not the time to build trust); first reference to the SDG (Number 3 - health for all), with a comment that about half of the global population currently lacks adequate access to public health resources
3. Catalyze innovation for neglected diseases (with a mention of CEPI and the first [pediatric malaria vaccine}(https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/apr/23/malawi-trial-child-malaria-vaccine-landmark) that was in the news earlier this week
4. Strengthen international mechanisms for preparedness and response (policies, financing etc. have been improved after Ebola, but still much to do), with a mention of the Global Health Security Agenda and Joint External Evaluations and the African Center for Disease Control; reference to silos and to public-private partnerships, e.g. transport companies for outbreak scenarios
5. Build and sustain political will and accountability — with reference to a PATH report Healthier World, Safer America

In closing, she makes multiple comparisons between preparedness for military and pandemic threats, especially in Virginia with its strong military presence/ roots/ culture.

Closes off with reference to the 1918 pandemic

[Daniel-Mietchen]

Now on to the 2nd round of Lightning talks

• Farza Farnoud Hassanzadeh - predicting the acquisition of antibiotic resistance under specific conditions
  • antibiotic resistance is causing about 700k deaths a year
  • Dynamic Bayesian Network Model
  • test species: Pseudomonas aeruginosa again, due to availability of specific strains from Jason Papin's lab
• problems:
  • missing data
  • variability in separate datasets
  • model complexity

No results shown.

[Daniel-Mietchen]

Martin Wu, Resistance prediction of Clostridium difficile infection

• affects people treated with antibiotics (Vancomycin, Fidaxomicin)
• causes diarrhea of varying severity, including 14k deaths a year in the US alone

In clinical practice, anibiotic resistance is not routinely tested, even though antibiotic failure rate is high (ca. 1/3) ==> goal: rapid test for anibiotic resistance in C. difficile based on nanopore sequencing bacterial DNA from stool samples (of which they have 103 as of now)

Nice slide with bacterial composition in the stool of one patient, including 0.14 percent C. difficile. Top one was Akkermansia muciniphila.

Needs info on the genes that are involved in conferring resistance.

Signs of emerging resistance to Vancomycin and Fidaxomicin (which targets RNA polymerase).

[Daniel-Mietchen]

Gregory Maddon: Cost of overtesting and overdiagnosing of C. difficile antibiotic resistance

No FDA-approved test to diagnose C. difficile infection (as opposed to colonization by C. difficile). Conventional tests are PCR-based and results not very reliable.

PCR Cycle threshold as a predictor of C. difficile toxin levels

[Daniel-Mietchen]

Md Amzad Hussein on Impact of Community Clinics on Health outcome, based on a field study in Bangladesh

• country-wide aim in Bangladesh: for every 6000 inhabitants, have a health clinic in walking distance

• the policy around that has changed three times around this, thereby constituting a "natural experiment" in terms of introducing/ phasing out community clinics

• those community clinics are very simple (may be just 2 rooms plus a lavatory) but serve in access of 100 million people in the country

[Daniel-Mietchen]

Kate McManus: HIV and health insurance (in the US)

• lots of variation by states

[Daniel-Mietchen]

Now Jason Papin on antibiotic resistance "in the wild" (i.e. as opposed to very controlled laboratory conditions)

• work on how Pseudomonas aeruginosa adapts (phenotypically and genetically) to shifts in the environment, e.g. co-infections

[Daniel-Mietchen]

Angelina Angelucci on inflammasomes in congenital Zika virus infection

• mouse model

• measuring IL-1β and IL-6 using ELISA in brain and placenta

• can see inflammation through brain morphological changes

• they're planning to look at Caspase 1 and Gasdermin D next, which are at the beginning and end of the inflammasome pathway, respectively

[Daniel-Mietchen]

Now Volkan Köseoğlu on the extracellular lifestyle of an intracellular pathogen, who was originally (on paper) scheduled in the first session

Shigella infections and IcsA

Actin based motility, bile salts, biofilm formation in small intestine and colon

Q: Does Shigella develop biofilms under flow? A: Yes

Q: Does IcsA have a role in this biofilm formation? A:

Reminds me of the biofilm MRI my colleagues did back at IBMT

[Daniel-Mietchen]

Paper on IcsA