Biography:

Abstract:

Malaria is a devastating disease affecting millions of people each year yet, surprisingly, apart from the Artemisinin Combination Therapies (ACTs) there are relatively few effective treatments for Plasmodium falciparum and only one complete treatment for Plasmodium vivax.

This talk will briefly summarise the work of Medicines for Malaria Venture (MMV) and its mission to reduce the burden of malaria in disease-endemic countries by discovering, developing and facilitating delivery of new, effective and affordable antimalarial drugs in collaboration with international partners.

MMV manages a significant antimalarial pipeline and this has been strengthened in recent years with the delivery of new products, new clinical candidates and early stage discovery projects.  The talk will explain both the challenges that need to be overcome and the strategy adopted to control and eradicate the disease, including definitions of target product and candidate profiles necessary for asexual blood stage cures (including single dose combination treatment), transmission blocking, vivax and chemoprotection.

 

 

Biography:

Assistant Professor Dr. Kiatichai graduated Ph.D. (Medical Microbiology) from Faculty of Medicine Siriraj Hospital, Mahidol University, Thailand and postdoctoral studies from the National University of Singapore (NUS) for doing researches related to whole genome sequence (WGS) analysis of M. tuberculosis. His research focuses on several aspects of TB such as drug resistant TB and molecular diagnosis of TB. In the last 4 years, 2014-2017, Dr. Kiatichai has published 25 research articles in which 15 of those he is the first and/or corresponding author.

 

 

Abstract:

Drug resistant tuberculosis (TB) is a major public health problem.  The information regarding genotypic-phenotypic association of anti-TB drugs were limited, especially for the second line drugs. The aim of this study is to compare the concordant rate between whole genome sequence (WGS) based genotypic and phenotypic drug susceptibility testing of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) (n = 293). Drug susceptibility test using standard proportional method (agar based test) and whole genome sequencing (WGS) using Illumina platform of Mtb causing drug sensitive (n=51), mono-resistant (n=38), multi-drug resistant (MDR) (n = 96), MDR with fluoroquinolone resistant (n=84) and extensively-drug resistant (n = 23) TB in Thailand during 1998-2016 were performed. WGS analysis was performed using genetic mutation databases from PhyResSE and TB-Profiler program. It was found that the concordant rate between PhyResSE based genotype and phenotype of the first line drugs and second line drugs were 91.4% and 77.8%, respectively. The concordant rate between TB-profiler and phenotype of the first line drugs and second line drugs were 91.96% and 80.65% respectively. We found that particular drug in fluoroquinolone group were not homogeneously concordant to phenotypic results, e.g. Ofloxacin 90.3% vs Gatifloxacin was 56.6%. This study reported that the drug resistance mutation databases, especially for the second line drugs need to be improved. TB-Profiler database provide higher performance for detection of drug resistant TB for both the first and second line drugs. The mutations in gyrA and gyrB were not homogeneously associated to particular drug in fluoroquinolone groups.