A Three-day Symposium on “TOWARDS END TB: ACHIEVEMENTS, CHALLENGES AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS” organized by Translational Health Science and Technology Institute from 23^rd-25^th March, 2023

To mark the World Tuberculosis Day on 24^th March, Translational Health Science and Technology Institute (THSTI) organized a three-day symposium on “Towards End TB: Achievements, Challenges and Future Directions” from 23^rd-25^th March 2023 at its campus. The symposium saw leading clinicians, physician-scientists, academicians and researchers from academia and industries deliberating on the way forward to “Mukt Bharat” of Tuberculosis (TB), an important mission of the Government of India. Over the three days, the symposium saw a foot-fall of 400+ participants engaging in nine plenary sessions and listening to insightful talks from more than 40 distinguished speakers deliberating achievements, challenges and future directions towards “shortening the TB therapy”.

In his welcome address, Prof Pramod Garg, executive Director, THSTI spoke about the need of the hour to deliberate on the way forward towards the END TB goal of India by 2025. He highlighted the work done at THSTI in TB research and briefly talked about the potential anti-TB molecules developed by THSTI that have shown efficacy in vivo and are ready for Phase-I clinical trials.

Delivering the keynote address, Dr. Rajesh Gokhale, Secretary, Department of Biotechnology, spoke about the challenges faced in TB research and gave an overview of how TB therapy can be shortened through the collaborative efforts of academia and industries. He also shared his research discovery on kupyaphores and emphasized on nutritional economics of TB.

In her address at the conference, Dr Soumya Swaminathan said affordability, availability and suitability are crucial for finding global solutions for TB. She pointed out how global efforts & funding have fallen short of expectations but hoped that newer therapeutics and vaccines would help achieve ENDTB goal.

The symposium saw brainstorming sessions on the challenges and future directions for END TB from eminent speakers from clinical settings, academia and industries who gave different perspectives about the current TB research and the challenges.

To encourage young researchers and students, the symposium had poster sessions on the 24^th and 25^th of March 2023, with more than 120 participants from all over India. Ten best posters were awarded.

Apart from scientific sessions, cultural events were also part of the symposium.