Stool4TB Shares Major Strides from 2023 in Annual Consortium Meeting
Last April 15-16, the Stool4TB consortium came together for its third annual meeting, held this year in Maputo, Mozambique. The Stool4TB project aims to evaluate an innovative stool-based quantitative PCR (qPCR) diagnostic platform in two hard-to-diagnose populations, children and people living with HIV (PLHIV). Learn why TB is hard to diagnose in PLHIV and children.
33 people arrived in Mozambique representing various partners such as Manhiça Health Research Centre (CISM) in Mozambique, Baylor College of Medicine Children’s Foundation in Eswatini, Makerere University in Uganda, Barcelona Institute for Global Health (IS Global), Amsterdam Institute for Global Health and Development in the Netherlands, Baylor College of Medicine, the United States, and Research Center Borstel, Germany.
The Stool4TB Team Meets in Mozambique
As the project is moving into its final stages, this year’s meeting is an especially critical point for the project. With the project ramping up to finalize recruitment and follow-up this year, the eagerly awaited quantitative stool PCR (qPCR) diagnostic test will be performed. The meeting was therefore essential to plan the remaining steps and timelines. Meanwhile, the consortium was able to take large steps forward on finalizing the biorepository and publication plans for during and after the lifetime of the project. We were fortunate to have had attendance by the EDCTP officer responsible for our project, Montserrat Blazquez, who gave excellent insights and inspired us for the remaining project time left. Finally, the team shared that under the EDCTP3 programme, the Stool4TB project won a grant to extend the project until 2025.
Agostinho at The Union Conference
In addition to planning for the coming year, the meeting was also a celebration of the successes of the previous year. The completion of the adult cohort recruitment, the presentation of the first qualitative study results at the annual Union World Conference on Lung Health, the publication of the project’s first two publications, and the extension grant by EDCTP3 were some of the major milestones shared during the meeting. In the last year, we joined forces with an earlier stage project, Stool NIH, to become the Stool4TB Global Partnership. The Stool NIH project is a case control study of the same qPCR technology with almost the same partners and funded by the National Institutes for Health. This partnership will facilitate spread and use of this knowledge, as evidenced by the increased traction on our social media channels which prove its success as a dissemination strategy.
Stool4TB Presentations
After the completion of the project meetings, there were several other events organized throughout the remainder of the week. On Tuesday, there was a ‘state-of-the-art’ lecture on TB treatment by Professor Christoph Lange who described the latest developments in the field of TB treatment. This was followed by the PhD symposium with the PreFIT and CAGE projects during which all 9 PhD presented their progress. It was exciting to hear so many students starting to report results from the 2023 period while 2024 is shaping up to be an even bigger year as we expect more research results to come in the months to come. Over the following days, various workshops and trainings were hosted such as the one by Dr. Alice Zwerling from the University of Ottawa who held a training session on health economics followed by a scientific writing workshop by Professor Christoph Lange. A qPCR refresher training was also organized in the laboratory of Manhiça and there were MBLA training sessions on 22 and 23 April.
All in all, it was a successful and productive meeting, which allowed all team members to return to their institutions refreshed and with energy to make the fourth project year an even greater success than the preceding ones.