Jose Trevejo to Speak at TB Seminar Cosponsored by Draper on April 28, 2009, at Broad Institute; Register online
Speakers Program 6:00 p.m.
KJ Seung, M.D.
Associate Physician, Division of Global Health Equity, Brigham and Women’s Hospital
TB Diagnosis and Treatment in the Developing World:
Issues, Needs, and Stories from the Field.
TB continues to be one of the major infectious disease killers in the developing world. This presentation will discuss many of the most common bottlenecks to timely diagnosis and effective treatment of TB in resource-limited settings.
James Galagan, Ph.D.
Associate Director of Microbial Genome Analysis, Broad Institute
Dissecting Tuberculosis: Lessons from Genomics and Systems Biology
New discoveries aimed at combating TB hinge on a deep understanding of Mycobacterium Tuberculosis, the microbe that causes the disease. Genome-scale approaches promise to accelerate progress toward this important goal, yielding novel insights into disease pathology, progression, drug resistance and evolution. This talk will describe how the modern tools of genomics and systems biology are being brought to bear on these critical TB research areas.
Jose Trevejo, M.D., Ph.D.
Principal Scientist, Draper Laboratory
Diagnosing Tuberculosis: Pitfalls and Progress
TB control efforts have been greatly hampered by the lack of a rapid and simple diagnostic test. Current methods employ technology that has been available for over 100 years. New research on the biology of the organism and advances in instrumentation have offered some hope for fulfilling the need of novel diagnostic tools. This talk will review the current state of technology and discuss the future of diagnostic technologies.
Charles Dean, Ph.D.
Senior Research Investigator, Novartis
New Drugs in the Pipeline for Treatment of TB
The current treatment regime for TB suffers from several issues. These include the long duration of treatment and adverse effects, which contributes to nonadherance to the treatment regime and the emergence of resistance, which has fueled an increasing reported incidence of multi-drug resistant (MDR) and extensively drug resistant (XDR) TB. Treatment is also complicated by latency of infection, and finally, co-infection with TB and HIV presents particular challenges. Given this large and increasing unmet medical need, new strategies for the treatment of TB will be necessary. This talk will review the current pipeline and prospects for new agents in development to treat TB and will include a brief overview of Novartis activities in this area.