CRyPTIC Annual Committee Meeting in Dubai
We've asked Clara Grazian, post-doc with a double PhD in Applied Mathematics and Statistics from Université Paris-Dauphine and Sapienza Università di Roma, to tell us how the annual committee meeting in Dubai went. Clara's role in CRyPTIC is to understand the development of TB drug resistance mechanisms using genome-wide association studies (GWAS). Grazie Clara!! ***************************************** It was a great occasion for all the members to meet up and discuss past and future of the project in the beautiful setting of the Shangri-La Hotel in Dubai. So, where are we? First of all, we welcomed three new CRyPTIC partners: Ruwen Jou
Validating a dry-form broth microdilution DST for CRyPTIC
Since the 90s, the body of literature on the use of broth microdilution methods for tuberculosis drug-susceptibility testing has been growing strong, with a predominance of colorimetric techniques to indirectly ascertain mycobacterial growth (Yajko 1995, Collins 1997, Franzblau 1998, Palomino 1999, and Leite 2000, to name a few). In 2010, N. Sullivan, from TREK Diagnostics Systems, presented preliminary results (see C-151.posterE-2) of a 96-well microtitre dry format plate (MYCOTBI) containing 12 drugs, demonstrating 100% categorical correlation between APM and MYCOTBI, with good reproducibility. Clinical studies seeking to investigate the clinical application of this technology in a wide variety of susceptible and resistant
Microtitre DST training for CRyPTIC partners
As a means to standardise the microtitre DST technique deployed in CRyPTIC and train staff conducting the tests in each participating institution, a training course took place in Milan, in the summer of 2016. Those were busy days where protocols were optimised and shared between the Milanese team and scientists from Peru, Vietnam, South Africa, India, Singapore, England and Germany. Sarah Lehmann, a scientist representing IML red GmbH—the Institute of Microbiology and Laboratory Medicine in Gauting, part of WHO's SRL network—tells us about this experience: "On June 6th-8th and 13th-15th two 3-day training sessions on DST where held at the
The development of a high throughput, multi-drug and affordable drug-susceptibility assay for CRyPTIC
CRyPTIC’s aim is to obtain a complete catalogue of resistance-conferring mutations that, ultimately, will facilitate design of near-to-patient amplification-based molecular DST and enable routine culture-based assays to be finally phased out, with a move towards a WGS workflow. Robust quantitative measures of phenotypes—minimal inhibitory concentrations—that allow for a refined understanding of precise contributions of different genomic variants to the degree of drug susceptibility are, therefore, crucial. Moreover, this change in paradigm likely represents a valuable opportunity to continue to use some drugs with low-level resistance in second- or third-line regimens (what, for example, is done with HIV treatment), something important
Welcome to CRyPTIC website! And please do contribute!
Hello everyone. What a fantastic journey CRyPTIC has been! The website is finally online and we hope it will enhance our communication and make relevant information reach a wider audience. We envisage this as an open space to all partners willing to report and reflect on the work developed by the consortium or, more broadly, on all things TB-related. Given the multidisciplinary character of our group and research, we hope this channel to be populated with substantial and varied content, reflective of the multitude of perspectives that pave our way as we move forwards decrypting TB genomes all over the