On January 30-31, 2024, the TBVI Symposium was held in Les Diablerets, Switzerland. This year, the symposium brought together over 120 tuberculosis (TB) vaccine researchers, developers, funders and policymakers that are all part of TBVI’s network of over 60 research institutes, universities, industrial partners and funding agencies from 20 countries. To encourage synergy and knowledge exchange, two large European consortia that are coordinated by TBVI (ITHEMYC and TBVACHORIZON) held their annual meetings in the same week and joined the symposium as well.
The symposium offered a great chance to share the latest insights from leading scientists and stakeholders within and outside the TB field. It provided an opportunity to exchange new ideas on how to advance innovation in the field, to increase synergy, and to diversify and progress the TB vaccine pipeline.
Besides presentations about fundamental and applied research and novel technologies to innovate the TB vaccine pipeline, vaccine developers gave updates on their vaccine candidates. Furthermore, a debate was held to challenge the audience’s views on clinical trial design, and funders presented their current and future activities.
Three talented young scientists: Mphatso Phiri, Andy Tran and Paul Ogongo were awarded the TBVI-Talent Award. The Award is meant to encourage these young scientists’ progress in their careers and let them engage with others in the field. All three presented their work and had the opportunity to discuss their ideas with researchers, developers, funders, and policy makers. As a reward and keepsake, each awardee received a unique painting from the artist Paulina Siniatkina, a TB survivor who is dedicated to fighting stigma about TB victims. Paulina addressed the audience during the event via an impressive video message. Please follow the link to see her message: Video message Paulina Siniatkina (for more information about her work, please visit her website: Artist Paulina Siniatkina )
Finally, TBVI announced the launch of the Preclinical Pipeline developed by Stop TB Partnership WGNV. WGNV is the partnership’s Working Group on New TB Vaccines that helps to facilitate the development of new, more effective TB vaccines and tracks these in an interactive pipeline of preclinical and clinical candidates. This pipeline includes candidates from published proof-of-concept in animal models through to preparation for Phase 1 studies that have been submitted by the developers. The list of preclinical candidates by research stage can be accessed here, the sortable/filterable view here. If you have other candidates that are being developed, please submit the Preclinical Candidate Submission Form. If you know of yet other candidates, please share this message with the developers and encourage them to submit their candidate for inclusion in the Preclinical pipeline via the same form.
Presentations of the speakers of the symposium are available.
TBVI thanks all participants for attending and contributing to the great success of this symposium. We look forward to continuing our activities and starting new initiatives together with the field.
