TB talks honor outgoing HSPH dean

Tuberculosis specialists came from universities around the country to discuss the state of the disease at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and to honor Harvard School of Public Health Dean Barry R. Bloom, who has announced that he will be stepping down.

The speakers included several who worked in Bloom’s lab as they made their way into the world of tuberculosis research. Bloom, who announced in November that he would step down after nearly a decade at the School’s helm, has maintained a laboratory where he explores the immune response to tuberculosis. Bloom will become a Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor and continue his research as a member of the HSPH faculty.

Tuberculosis specialists came from universities around the country to discuss the state of the disease at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and to honor Harvard School of Public Health Dean Barry R. Bloom, who has announced that he will be stepping down.

The speakers included several who worked in Bloom’s lab as they made their way into the world of tuberculosis research. Bloom, who announced in November that he would step down after nearly a decade at the School’s helm, has maintained a laboratory where he explores the immune response to tuberculosis. Bloom will become a Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor and continue his research as a member of the HSPH faculty.

The symposium, which took place Monday (May 5) afternoon in the Kresge Building’s Snyder Auditorium, featured speakers discussing the current state of tuberculosis research and its future challenges.

Tuberculosis is an airborne contagion spread when a person with active TB disease coughs tuberculosis bacteria into the air. When the bacteria are inhaled by another person, they multiply and either cause the active disease or go into a noninfectious latent phase that can last for decades. It is believed that as many as one-third of the world’s population has been infected with the TB bacterium, but the vast majority have the latent form of the disease. Of those who are infected, just 10 percent will develop tuberculosis disease. Even with that relatively small proportion getting sick, the disease is a global killer, causing 1.6 million deaths in 2005, according to the World Health Organization.

The afternoon event featured 13 speakers on a variety of tuberculosis-related topics, ranging from the importance of vitamin D in boosting immune response to new primate models that may shed light on the disease’s long latent phase to future challenges facing researchers on the topic.

Though the subject matter was serious, several speakers took the time to remember their work with Bloom fondly.

Eric Rubin, associate professor of immunology and infectious disease at the Harvard School of Public Health and assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, said that after several discoveries in the 1950s and 1960s, tuberculosis research became something of a backwater. That changed in the early 1990s, he said, when research funding began to increase. Rubin credited Bloom for being a “catalyst” for tuberculosis’s return to prominence.

Though research funding has increased in recent years, so has the number of people infected with the disease, Rubin said.

Padmini Salgame, professor of medicine at New Jersey Medical School, said she believes the biggest missing piece in tuberculosis research is an understanding of what happens immediately after a person is infected with the tuberculosis bacteria until it enters the latent stage, where it can persist for decades until some event — such as an attack on the immune system from HIV, the virus that causes AIDS — brings it out of hiding and initiates active tuberculosis disease.

If we can understand better how the body walls off the disease, we can perhaps get clues on how to better fight it, Salgame said.

“We do know immune responses are important, but what’s keeping the infection latent?” Salgame said. “There’re a lot of things we don’t know.”

JoAnne Flynn, a professor of immunology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, described a new animal model that might shed light on what happens during the latent period. Flynn said she’s begun using macaques — a type of monkey — instead of the commonly used mice to study tuberculosis’s latent period. That is necessary, she said, in order to study the granulomas that characterize the disease’s latent period, which mice do not develop.

The monkeys can develop the latent form of the disease, Flynn said, and the research has already begun to shed light on the importance of different types of immune cells to the development of granulomas, within which the TB bacteria are kept during the latent phase.

alvin_powell@harvard.edu

The symposium, which took place Monday (May 5) afternoon in the Kresge Building’s Snyder Auditorium, featured speakers discussing the current state of tuberculosis research and its future challenges.

Tuberculosis is an airborne contagion spread when a person with active TB disease coughs tuberculosis bacteria into the air. When the bacteria are inhaled by another person, they multiply and either cause the active disease or go into a noninfectious latent phase that can last for decades. It is believed that as many as one-third of the world’s population has been infected with the TB bacterium, but the vast majority have the latent form of the disease. Of those who are infected, just 10 percent will develop tuberculosis disease. Even with that relatively small proportion getting sick, the disease is a global killer, causing 1.6 million deaths in 2005, according to the World Health Organization.

The afternoon event featured 13 speakers on a variety of tuberculosis-related topics, ranging from the importance of vitamin D in boosting immune response to new primate models that may shed light on the disease’s long latent phase to future challenges facing researchers on the topic.

Though the subject matter was serious, several speakers took the time to remember their work with Bloom fondly.

Eric Rubin, associate professor of immunology and infectious disease at the Harvard School of Public Health and assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, said that after several discoveries in the 1950s and 1960s, tuberculosis research became something of a backwater. That changed in the early 1990s, he said, when research funding began to increase. Rubin credited Bloom for being a “catalyst” for tuberculosis’s return to prominence.

Though research funding has increased in recent years, so has the number of people infected with the disease, Rubin said.

Padmini Salgame, professor of medicine at New Jersey Medical School, said she believes the biggest missing piece in tuberculosis research is an understanding of what happens immediately after a person is infected with the tuberculosis bacteria until it enters the latent stage, where it can persist for decades until some event — such as an attack on the immune system from HIV, the virus that causes AIDS — brings it out of hiding and initiates active tuberculosis disease.

If we can understand better how the body walls off the disease, we can perhaps get clues on how to better fight it, Salgame said.

“We do know immune responses are important, but what’s keeping the infection latent?” Salgame said. “There’re a lot of things we don’t know.”

JoAnne Flynn, a professor of immunology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, described a new animal model that might shed light on what happens during the latent period. Flynn said she’s begun using macaques — a type of monkey — instead of the commonly used mice to study tuberculosis’s latent period. That is necessary, she said, in order to study the granulomas that characterize the disease’s latent period, which mice do not develop.

The monkeys can develop the latent form of the disease, Flynn said, and the research has already begun to shed light on the importance of different types of immune cells to the development of granulomas, within which the TB bacteria are kept during the latent phase.

alvin_powell@harvard.edu