Weekly round-up #177

 
albert calmette and camille guerin bcg100

 

Sunday marked 100 years since the first use of the venerable BCG vaccine for humans. VALIDATE has been very busy marking the occasion with a variety of online activities, including officially launching our BCG Adventure Computer games and completing our #BCG100Facts about TB and BCG. Over the last few months, we have also marked this anniversary with a series of public talks and you can find these videos and of these on the BCG100 Page.

BCG is still the only licenced vaccine that protects against tuberculosis and you can find out more about what VALIDATE is doing to improve or replace it on our TB page.

 

Tuberculosis Infection and T cell-Mediated Immunity with Dr Yupei Xiao - Watch now!

 

On Thursday 15 July 2021, over 60 VALIDATE members and guests gathered on Zoom to hear a great talk from Dr Yupei Xiao. Dr Xiao, is the Medical Science Liaison for the EU and the Rest of the World at Oxford Immunotec, a global, high-growth diagnostics company offering regulated ELISPOT assays for T cell measurement, with approval around the globe. In this seminar, Dr Xiao discusses the Immunology of latent TB infection (LTBI) and active TB disease, the granuloma formation and T cell medicated immunity and the immunology behind T cell-mediated immunity tests.

You can watch the seminar and Q&A online - www.validate-network.org/event/immunotec

 

Funding:

  • ERC Synergy Grant 2021 - Are you a researcher that wants to address a research problem so ambitious, that can not be dealt with you and your team alone? The Synergy Grants could be for you!- deadline 10 November 2021
  • ERC Proof of Concept Grants 2021 - Have you already received an ERC grant for your frontier research project and now want to explore the commercial or societal potential of your work? The ERC Proof of Concept Grant could be for you - deadline 10 November 2021

You can find a list of all relevant external funding we've spotted for our members on our external funding page.

Training Opportunities and Events:

Find more training and events opportunities on our Training and Events pages.

Job Opportunities:

There are many more relevant career opportunities on our jobs page.

 

 Publications:

Check out our Publications Page for members' publications and email VALIDATE@ndm.ox.ac.uk if you have a paper you would like us to include.

Highlights on Twitter this week:

We shared a useful resource from Fullfact for fact-checking vaccine claims and celebrated 100 years of the BCG vaccine. Tereza Kasaeva from the WHO had an important message for the anniversary. We launched BCG adventures and it was played by  VALIDATE members Greg Pollara,  Nick de Vrij and Karin Dijkman and sister network Bactivac. The British Society for Immunology created a great video about the need for multiple doses of vaccines and the Global TB Caucus launched their #100DayChallange, pointing out that it only took 100 days to develop the first COVID-19 Vaccines whilst there has been no new TB vaccine since 1921. We also finished our #BCG100Facts infographics with information about the first use of BCG in 1921, the limitations of BCG, potential improvements to the vaccine and what VALIDATE is doing.

Follow @NetworkVALIDATE on Twitter for all this and more - and take part in BCG100 by using the hashtag #BCG100.

 

Published: 21 July 2021