ECCMID is the largest annual clinically focused infectious disease meeting in Europe, attracting a record breaking 12,494 delegates from 126 countries worldwide.

Although ECCMID is a profoundly clinical focused meeting, our CO-ADD team found some great inspiration from talks on biofilm eradication, diagnostic technologies and general updates on the spread of infectious diseases throughout Europe and beyond. This year’s meeting had a heavy focus on the challenges of successfully treating biofilms (both bacterial and fungal), and diagnostics for bacterial, fungal and viral identification.

CO-ADD’s Program Director Professor Matthew Cooper was delighted to have a packed out auditorium with an audience of ~2,000 delegates for his CO-ADD talk titled -  New drugs against Gram-negatives: from discovery to late-stage development. Following Professor Cooper’s presentation, the CO-ADD team had  a number of interested parties discussing the motivation behind the program and were complimentary to the team for a great effort thus far. 

Matt Cooper presenting the Community for Open Antimicrobial Drug Discovery (CO-ADD) at ECCMID 2017 Vienna.

Also in attendance was our Program Co-ordinator for Hit Validation and Chemistry, Dr. Mark Blaskovich, who gave an e-poster presentation on one of the team’s more advanced internal Gram-negative research programs (outside CO-ADD scope), sparking great interest from academics and industry focused professionals. 

Mark Blaskovich presenting an e-poster at ECCMID 2017 Vienna.

Program Co-ordinator for Microbiology and Screening Dr. Alysha Elliott also presented a poster, focused on an internal research collaboration she has been leading to characterise the mode of action of a class of promising antimicrobial peptides. When not attending talks she made good use of the large exhibitor arena to meet with industry supply companies for ideas on improving our robotic systems for high-throughput screening and had fruitful conversations with representatives of TECAN, PerkinElmer, Beckman Coulter and BD. Dr. Elliott was also pleased to meet academic, clinicians and microbiologist of reference culture labs keen for collaboration to provide CO-ADD with a great diversity of isolates for Hit-Validation assessment.

The team had a great time at ECCMID hearing leading professionals in infectious diseases and partaking in productive discussions for future action, and are bringing back some great new ideas for our screening initiative as well as a few extra kilos from a week’s worth of Viennese famous Wien Schnitzels,  Lamb lettuce potato salads, and apple strudel.

CO-ADD member Alsyaha Elliott with Adenium collaborator Magnus Strandh at her poster at ECCMID pic.twitter.com/57wqpVolDJ

— Mark Blaskovich (@mark_blaskovich) April 24, 2017