From Bench to Field

With widespread environmental changes and population migrations, numerous infectious diseases have emerged and re-emerged in different areas of the world. While medically diverse, Tropical Infectious Diseases (TIDs) share features that allow them to persist under conditions of poverty, resulting in clustering and overlap of different diseases. Many of these diseases are zoonotic and transmitted to man directly from animals or via vectors, and disease distribution reflects the dynamics of human populations, host reservoirs and pathogen vectors.

In this Gordon Research Conference we will focus on the most prevalent TIDs, with special emphasis on research areas that made significant recent progress. The conference will cover arboviral diseases, cholera, filariasis, leishmaniasis, malaria, rickettsiosis and trypanosomiasis. For each disease, we will strive to discuss how progress made at the bench is being translated to actions in the field. Speakers will be asked to provide their vision of the most promising approaches for conquering these diseases in the future. The conference program is designed to provide a platform to discuss in an integrated manner, interventions at the levels of the pathogens as well as the invertebrate and vertebrate hosts. Younger investigators and students will have an opportunity to interact with leaders in the different fields. The intent is to promote discussions from basic to applied questions and to generate ‘cross-fertilization’ among different specialties and fields of knowledge. It is hoped that new insights on fundamental questions will emerge as a multidisciplinary community of scientists interested in TIDs is created.