Weekly round-up #61

Weekly round-up #61

 

VALIDATE Director, Prof Helen McShane, talking at Les Diablerets 2019

VALIDATE Director, Prof Helen McShane, presents VALIDATE at Les Diablerets 2019

The TB members of VALIDATE have had a busy couple of weeks with many attending Keystone in Canada last week and TBVAC2020 in Les Diablerets this week, where VALIDATE Director, Prof Helen McShane's talk "Introducing VALIDATE: A Global Challenges Research Fund network in vaccine R&D for complex intracellular pathogens” was warmly received as part of TBVI's “TB Vaccines Global Collaboration and Recent Advances in the Field” symposium.

 

Back at VALIDATE's home in Oxford we launched our VALIDATE Data Portal, where members can safely share and compare data sets across pathogens, species, countries, research groups, and trials to find new lessons to learn from the synergies and differences in the data. Do get in contact with Research Data Analyst Dr Deniz Cizmeci with any queries about the Portal.

 

Fort those interested, the presentations from the GCRF Vaccine Networks Vaccinology course, held in Thailand in December 2019, are now available on our members-only document/resources library. There you can also find slides from our Annual Meetings and Workshops, and we hope to continue to add useful documents here for you - let us know if you have any documents you would like to share with other members.

 

Finally, to mark World Leprosy Day on 27th January 2019 we spoke to a couple of VALIDATE members who are working on vaccine development for leprosy to find out more about this disease, their research, and the challenges of vaccine development - a big thank you to Drs Hua Wang and Rachel Tanner for letting us interview them! You can read this blog post here.

 

Funding: 

  • AfOx Visiting Fellowships - funds visits to the University of Oxford for residents of an African country to initiate or strengthen collaborative partnerships - deadline 8 Feb 2019
  • Newton International Fellowships - for post-docs from Brazil, China, India & Mexico - deadline 27 Mar 2019
  • BSI Travel Awards - funds travel costs to attend meetings and for lab exchanges - various deadlines throughout year

 

Our external funding page lists further funding opportunities.

 

Training Opportunities:

 

Our training opportunities page has information about all upcoming opportunities we've seen.

 

Events

 

Our events page has details about all relevant upcoming external events.

 

Job Opportunities: 

 

And, of course, if you know anyone who might be interested in being our VALIDATE Network Assistant, do forward our job advert to them!

Further vacancies can be found on our website.

 

Publications:

Dose finding for new vaccines: The role for immunostimulation/ immunodynamic modelling by VALIDATE member Sophie J Rhodes, Richard G White and Thomas G Evans with collaborators in J Theoretical Biology

Prevention of tuberculosis infection and disease by local BCG in repeatedly exposed rhesus macaques by K Dijkman et al in Nature Medicine 

 

Publications of relevance to our members can be found on our publications page.

 

On Twitter this week: read about how CARTAfrica promote gender inclusion; a Nature case study on Estonia and how a small country can turn its scientific fortunes around with international support and well-designed domestic policies; watch a great video demonstrating the dedication of medical staff in Pakistan who fight through waist-deep snow to get polio vaccines to those in need; visit the InfoLep portal for publications about leprosy in the top 14 affected countries; find out about the 157 laws that discriminate against leprosy sufferers in 29 countries; the threat of TB to Asian elephants; a new method for identifying TB in rhinos; and how a temperature-stable candidate TB vaccine has entered phase I trials. Follow @NetworkVALIDATE to stay up to date on all the news and developments in our field.

 

Published:30 January 2019