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

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

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

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

• 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

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

• (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

• 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).

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

• 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

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

Scholia profiles updated:

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