Weekly round-up #113

World Health Day: Yesterday was World Health Day 2020. This year the World Health Organisation was encouraging people to thank nurses and midwives across the planet and many of our members participated. There are still some excellent resources and useful facts and figures on the WHO website. Healthcare workers not only save lives on a daily basis, they are also essential in supporting much of the clinical work VALIDATE members undertake. So, even if you missed World Health Day yesterday, we encourage our members to take a minute to say thank you on social media.

Have you published recently?: As usual, we have included a list of new publications that are relevant to our members on tuberculosis, leishmaniasis, melioidosis and leprosy. We are very keen to publicise your work so do get in touch if you have published research recently and we will make sure to tweet it and include it in both our Weekly Round-up and Publications page. If you have something to share, email validate@ndm.ox.ac.uk.

Know any prospective new VALIDATE members?: We are an open network and want to connect together researchers around the world working on our pathogens. Our membership levels include everyone from senior scientists, to postdocs to anyone interested in our vaccine development work. If you know colleagues, collaborators or friends who may be interested, please ask them to check out the benefits of joining VALIDATE and encourage them to apply for membership.

Funding:

Academy of Medical Sciences Professorship Scheme, 2020: A package of support to biomedical and healthcare researchers taking up their first full Professorship - deadline 21 May 2020
EDCTP 2020 have published calls for proposals that will open for applications on 10 April 2020, including:
- Ethics and regulatory capacities: This call for proposals aims to support sub-Saharan African countries to establish and/or develop robust national medicines regulatory systems - deadline 16 July 2020
- Career Development Fellowships in poverty-related diseases and child and adolescent health: Call for proposals is to support early- to mid-career researchers ("fellows") by providing them with opportunities to train and develop their clinical research skills – deadline 5 August 2020

The following deadlines are upcoming:

RSTMH Small Grants - To enable ECRs and global health professionals in the field of tropical medicine or global health to undertake clinical or scientific research and/or fieldwork – deadline 27 Apr 2020
Wellcome Trust International Training Fellowships - Scheme offering nationals of LMICs the opportunity to receive training at postgraduate or postdoctoral level - deadline 7 May 2020 (Extended)
MRC Infection & Immunity Board Programme Grants - UK based researchers' programmes for infectious human disease and disorders of the human immune system - deadline 13 May 2020
MRC Infections & Immunity Board Research Grants - UK based research into infectious human disease and disorders of the human immune system - deadline 13 May 2020
MRC Infection & Immunity Board New Investigator Research Grants - To support researchers becoming principal investigators - deadline 13 May 2020
MRC Infection & Immunity Board Partnership Grants - Core funds to support partnerships between diverse groupings of researchers for one to five years - deadline 13 May 2020
Women in Innovation Awards - To find and support the UK's most promising female innovators and develop their ideas - registration TBA, 2020

You can find lots of further open grant calls on our funding opportunities page.

Training Opportunities:

TRANSVAC2 Open Calls -

M13 'Systems Biology of Vaccinology': Definition and overview of the systems biology approach; examples of systems biology studies in immunology and vaccine studies; learn how to perform transcriptomic data analysis and correlation analysis with immunologic data - 25 to 26 June 2020, application deadline extended - 10 April 2020
M14 'Regulatory aspects of vaccine development': This two-day interactive training workshop on vaccine development will introduce participants to planning a regulatory strategy for vaccines with emphasis on the early phases of development - 11 to 12 June 2020, application deadline 15 April 2020

Events:

Our events page will keep you up to date on changes made to external events due to the COVID-19 outbreak. In addition, the VALIDATE Team is looking at ways to bring members together over the next few months, if only electronically. Keep an eye on Twitter, LinkedIn and visit our events page to keep informed.

Job Opportunities:

Upcoming deadlines for some excellent employment opportunities:

Grants Manager - RSTMH, London, UK, deadline 29 Apr 2020
The Organization for Women in Science for the Developing World PhD Fellowships, International, deadline 31 May 2020

Visit our job webpage for further opportunities that are currently available.

Publications:

New live attenuated tuberculosis vaccine MTBVAC induces trained immunity and confers protection against experimental lethal pneumonia.Tarancón R et al, in PLoS Pathog
Melioidosis In Suspected Recurrent Tuberculosis: A disease in disguise, authors include VALIDATE members Tushar Shaw and Chiranjay Mukhopadhyay, in JIDC
Development and Characterization of an Avirulent Leishmania major Strain, Jha M et al, in the Journal of Immunology

For World TB Day last month The Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene compiled a list of articles on Tuberculosis that are available free online.

Our publications page is an easy way to find papers that may be of interest to you.

Highlights on Twitter this week: On Thursday we shared the New England Journal of Medicine's excellent interactive graphic "Tuberculosis in 2020"; on Tuesday, we were tweeting about #WorldHealthDay2020 in support of the excellent WHO campaign in support of nurses and midwives; researchers in Australia and the Netherlands are investigating the BCG vaccine as a weapon against COVID-19; the GHIT Fund announced a total of 3.29 billion yen to invest in various partnerships to develop lifesaving vaccines, drugs and diagnostics for tuberculosis, leishmaniasis and other infectious diseases; and sample chapters, giving tips on how to formulate a research problem and construct hypotheses. All this and more @NetworkVALIDATE, so do follow us if you are on Twitter.

Published: 08 April 2020