Dr Sanjib Bhakta leads professional and public events to commemorate World TB Day 2015
From the international TB Day summit to the Building Bridges project at the Science Museum, Dr Bhakta shares his team's research investigations in the fight against Tuberculosis.
March 24 2015 was World Tuberculosis (TB) Day and to mark this event Dr Sanjib Bhakta, Reader in Molecular Microbiology and Director of the ISMB-Mycobacteria Research Laboratory at Birkbeck, University of London took part in an international TB summit and various outreach activities. He chaired this year’s TB Summit (March 24 – 26) at O2 Arena, London, where researchers from around the world discussed TB detection, treatments and new developments in preventing the infectious disease of global emergency. Following the conference a meeting report will be published in the journal Virulence.
Dr Bhakta also delivered a public lecture and report on an ongoing Science Project with Year 11 students at St Mary’s School, Buckinghamshire. The School won the You Can Initiative Award 2014 from British Institute of Technology and E-Commerce for the TB or not TB project, which was a co-operation between Dr Bhakta and the School, to test existing 'over-the-counter' available medicines to investigate if they have antibiotic-like properties that could be used in the fight against TB. In this context, Dr Bhakta wrote a review article, Repurposing - a ray of hope in tackling extensive drug resistance in TB, which was part of a special issue of the International Journal of Infectious Diseases, published on World TB Day 2015.
At the Science Museum, Dr Bhakta volunteered to be part of a Building Bridges project designed by Lucy Yates and Anna Fisher. This public event was a science journalism activity based around the museum’s contemporary science galleries. On Tuesday 17 March, he spoke to the participating school students about his current investigation into tuberculosis (TB) and chaired a debate on ‘Should we be researching new antibiotics to fight of disease, or is it better for our bodies to fight off disease on their own?’. The students then used the information to create displays relating to their opinions on the subject.
Research undertaken by Dr Bhakta’s lab team has developed a technique which allows TB cultures to be grown more quickly and naturally than other available methods, thereby decreasing the time required to test new drug compounds for treating the disease.
You can keep up-to-date with the research and outreach activities of the ISMB-Mycobacteria Research Lab on Dr Bhakta’s Facebook page .