Application for Partial Funding to Support the 3rd Conference on AIDS - Related Mycoses Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine University of Cape Town, South Africa 10-12 July 2019 Organisers: Andrew Limper (USA), J. Claire Hoving (South Africa), Gordon Brown (United Kingdom), Beatriz L. Gmez (Columbia), Nelesh Govender (South Africa), Robin May (United Kingdom), David Meya (Uganda) This proposal requests partial support for a meeting on AIDS-related mycoses to be held in Cape Town, South Africa on July 10-12, 2019. This meeting follows two extremely successful previous workshops that were held in Cape Town in July 2013 and 2016, which received excellent participant feedback and have led to important actions. These successes include identifying key gaps and important next steps in the field through position statements. The meeting has also provided a platform for discussions centered on WHO advanced HIV guidance and have led to establishing working groups in neglected fields such as Pneumocystis Pneumonia. The broad and long-term goal of this workshop is to bring together the world's leading researchers dealing with AIDS-related mycoses to foster cross-disciplinary discussions and collaborations and to identify the key issues to be tackled.
Specific aims of this meeting are to convene nearly 40 leading experts covering a broad range of mycoses with broad geographic representation comparable to the previous workshops, with a total of up to 120 participants for a three-day conference in a country that has high disease prevalence. The program will be structured into sessions covering immunological defects during HIV/AIDS, fungal immunology, host- pathogen interaction, epidemiology and public health, improving diagnostics, drug resistance, evaluation of treatment and new drugs. Afternoon poster sessions will permit all participants to contribute. The health- relatedness of this application is central and the discussions generated will help identify important knowledge gaps in the basic science, in particular those required for translation of novel strategies for prevention, diagnosis and therapy; which are desperately required in order to reduce the very high mortality associated with these devastating fungal infectious diseases.
Fungi are major causes of mortality and morbidity in AIDS, resulting in over 1.6 million deaths annually with the majority of these deaths occurring in low-to-middle income countries, particularly Sub-Saharan Africa. We will host the next AIDS-related Mycoses workshop at the University of Cape Town. This AIDS-related Mycoses meeting uniquely brings together international mycologists and AIDS researchers, stimulating collaborations and discussions that will define the important questions that need to be addressed to combat these devastating infections.
