Fighting drug resistant tuberculosis – InfectoGnostics meets MYCO-NET² partners in Peru

Tuberculosis (TB) is still one of the top ten causes of death worldwide: In 2015, 10.4 million people fell ill with TB and 1.8 million died from the disease. Especially the multidrug-resistant variant (MDR-TB) is a severe health threat that affected almost 0.5 million people in 2015 alone.

To develop novel and efficient tools to fight this disease the MYCO-NET² project was started in 2015. Now, from 26 to 28 April 2017, the international partners of this project gather for a meeting in Lima (Peru) to discuss the topic: “Interdisciplinary Advancements for Fighting Infectious Microorganisms: A Focus on Mycobacterium tuberculosis”.

The project meeting brings together representatives from Germany (Leibniz Institute of Photonic Technology, IPHT), Peru (Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas, UPC and Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia, UPCH), Argentina (Instituto de Nanosistemas, INS) and Spain (Funde Salud).

For InfectoGnostics the managing director Dr. Jens Hellwage presents the Research Campus concept as an example for using an innovation hub to successfully transfer basic research into high tech products.

The main scientific topics of the workshop are multidisciplinary approaches for understanding and detecting drug resistant TB. For instance, Dr. Dana Cialla-May from the German InfectoGnostics partner IPHT presents current developments for Raman-spectroscopic detection of M. tuberculosis and its drug resistances.

Other partners present screening methods for early diagnostics using state-of-the-art nanotechnology, lab-on-a-chip devices, genomics, high throughput sequencing, and bioinformatics.

http://www.infectognostics.de/en/campus/news/details/news/fighting-drug-resistan…