In this LabTalk Podcast by The Scientist, meeting co-organizer Dr. David Alland talks about his roots in the field and lessons learned in developing rapid-point-of-care tuberculosis diagnostics.

“If you understand tuberculosis, you understand all of immunology, public health, microbiology, and a good part of world history,”

he says, quoting his mentor Dr. Barry Bloom. “That’s what got me hooked.” And indeed, he has integrating all of these aspects of tuberculosis research to reach this point in his career as Chief of Infectious Disease and Director of the Center for Emerging Pathogens and the Center for COVID-19 Response and Pandemic Preparedness at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School. As he describes his work, he highlights the need to study drug resistance hand-in-hand with diagnostic and treatment strategies:

“The underlying biology (of tuberculosis drug resistance) is both fascinating and important because to really design drugs that don’t engender resistance, we need to know how these kinds of resistances develop, and then hopefully we can find ways to design around them.”

In this KSQA feature interview, Dr. Bruno Andrade, co-organizer of the upcoming eSymposia virtual meeting on “Tuberculosis: Science Aimed at Ending the Epidemic,” shares how new technologies and integrative approaches are enabling a deeper understanding of tuberculosis pathogenesis, resistance mechanisms and epidemiology. These new insights and tools are leading researchers to better diagnostics, treatments and public health strategies against TB, with the potential to finally end the TB epidemic.

In addition, Andrade explains how COVID has impacted the field, from the patient to public health perspective. He describes how the TB research community is uniquely positioned with the knowledge and tools to help, and how they have come together to address this new pulmonary threat.

Finally, he discusses his new role as Chief Editor of the new “Frontiers in Tropical Diseases” journal, which launches on December 7, 2020. Drawing from his own research experience, Andrade helped to shape the scope of the new journal to take on a novel integrative research perspective. Only by incorporating multi-dimensional information from diverse fields can we overcome TB resistance to achieve eradication, and Andrade aims to encourage and highlight such transformative cross-disciplinary collaborations with this new journal, and at the eSymposia virtual meeting.