Workshop on Training in the TB Basic Sciences, Cape Town

JUNE 2006

On 5 June 2006, a Workshop on Training in the Basic Sciences was held at the Vineyard Hotel in Cape Town. The Workshop was co-organized by Valerie Mizrahi from the Wits node of the CBTBR and Gilla Kaplan from the Public Health Research Institute (PHRI) in New Jersey (USA) and was funded by the Columbia University-southern African Fogarty HIV/AIDS International Training and Research Program (CU-SA Fogarty AITRP) and the Aeras Global TB Vaccine Foundation.

Valerie and Gilla serve on the Steering Committee of the CU-SA Fogarty AITRP, which is led by Quarraisha Abdool Karim from the University of KwaZulu Natal. They are responsible for coordinating the TB Basic Science component of this highly successful international research training programme. The CU-SA Fogarty AITRP is funded through the Fogarty International Center of the US National Institutes of Health and is aimed at developing, enhancing and sustaining scientific capacity southern Africa. The inclusion of a TB Basic Science component in this programme has enabled scientists and clinicians from southern Africa to undertake advanced training in the US since 1999 and in so doing, has contributed significantly to building capacity in TB research in the region.

The Workshop was convened with the aim of maximizing the impact of the TB Basic Science component of the CU-SA Fogarty AITRP over the next few years and identifying mechanisms by which it could be leveraged. A total of 31 delegates from South Africa and the USA attended the Workshop. The international delegates were Gilla Kaplan, Barry Kreiswirth and Dorothy Fallows from the PHRI, which is the primary US-based training site for the TB Basic Science component of the CU-SA Fogarty AITRP. Local delegates from Cape Town, Durban, Johannesburg, Pretoria and Stellenbosch included past and current fellows, the heads of their local labs, other members of the TB research community and representatives from the DST, NRF and MRC. Participants from the CBTBR were current and past fellows Stephanie Dawes, Bavesh Kana, Carmen Pheiffer and Betty Mowa, as well as Paul van Helden, Rob Warren and Nico Gey van Pittius.

Presentations from the fellows and local lab heads highlighted the achievements of the programme and emphasized the value of the training in terms of the professional development of each fellow, the impact on research outputs, and international networking and collaboration. The Workshop also exposed a broader range of TB researchers to this programme and helped to strengthen the local TB research network.

Exchange visit
In May 2006, Bavesh Kana from the Wits node of the CBTBR visited some collaborators in Moscow, Russia. He spent two weeks visiting laboratories in the Russian Academy of Sciences (including the Bakh Institute of Biochemistry) and the Laboratory for Immunogenetics at The Central Institute for Tuberculosis in the Moscow region. He also visited the State Scientific Centre for Applied Microbiology in Obolensk. The purpose of his visit was to discuss possibilities of expanding the already fruitful collaboration that the Wits node has with researchers at these institutions on the study of resuscitation promoting factors in Mycobacterium tuberculosis.

Awards
Valerie Mizrahi was awarded the Beckman-Coulter Gold Medal Award for 2005 from the South African Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (SASBMB). She will receive her medal at the SASBMB Conference in Pietermaritzburg in July where she will present the Beckman-Coulter Gold Medal Lecture.