24^th April, 2023, Haikou

Innovation leads the future is the theme of this year’s forum, which has been successfully held from 20-22^nd April, Haikou city, Hainan province. The second national TB innovation forum is collaboration between Beijing Chest Hospital, Clinical Center on Tuberculosis, China Center of Disease Prevention and Control and Innovation Alliance (IATB) with technical assistance and philanthropical donations provided by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF).

In the wake of COVID-19 pandemic, tuberculosis prevention and control faces daunting challenges posed a rebounding death cases and an ever increasing gap of case detection let alone meeting the ambitious targets set for global TB elimination by 2035. To address these challenges, global efforts need to be harnessed, especially on the innovation front. Introduction of new drugs and regimens, POC TB tests that is capable of peripheral deployment, viable non-sputum sampling strategy, computer aided detection of TB and of course a couple of more effective TB vaccines are key to the eventual eradication of TB.

In recent years, China has seen many promising new drugs, IVDs as well as vaccination strategies coming out, a number of them have caught the attention of the world, as they have shown potential for uptake in high-burden resource constraint settings. This forum is a window for the world to see these development and communicate with the developers in person and forge further research collaborations to bring these technologies to the populations in need.

Also, the forum has invited speakers from around the world to bring to China the global frontiers of novel TB drug, IVDs and vaccination R&D, namely we have invited the WHO to speak about the latest Target Product Profiles (TPPs) to outline the preferred characteristics of future diagnostics; we have invited speakers from TB-Alliance, MSF and FIND to introduce the current R&D pipeline of anti-TB pharmaceutics and IVDs, speaker from Stop TB partnership to introduce some of their validation works in using CAD4TB for active case finding in areas where radiologist expertise is scarce.

The three day forum has been an instant success with many positive feedbacks received, many believe that such communication should be a fixture into the future. What China has to offer in terms of tackling the challenges of TB needs such platform to showcase our capacity to the world.  

Report by Zi Chen, Innovation Alliance

Photo by Lin Cong, Beijing Chest Hospital