Pasteur Network Annual Meeting 2023 will take place in Tunis

The Pasteur Network Annual Meeting 2023 (PNAM), co-organized with the Institut Pasteur de Tunis (IPT) will take place from 19 to 21 November 2023 at the Laico Hotel and Conference Center in Tunis, Tunisia. The PNAM gathers professionals from all Pasteur Network members, scientific institutions, public health institutions, multilateral organizations, civil society organizations and charitable foundations focusing on science and public health.

The meeting will focus on global thematic priorities including climate sensitive emerging infectious diseases, the R&D and innovation ecosystem, epidemic intelligence, AMR, and mother and child health.

The opening ceremony will take place on Sunday 19 November starting at 6 pm (UTC+1) chaired by Hechmi Louzir, former Director General of IPT, and will include opening remarks by the recently appointed Director General of IPT, Samia Menif. Amadou Sall, President of the Pasteur Network & CEO of the Institut Pasteur de Dakar, Stewart Cole, President of the Pasteur Network Foundation & President of the Institut Pasteur, Rebecca Grais, Executive Director of the Pasteur Network, Ali M’rabet, Minister of Health of Tunisia will also provide remarks. Furthermore, presentations will be delivered on “Tuberculosis – the forgotten pandemic” by Stewart Cole and “Arabic medicine & Arabic civilization” by Dr. Rafik Boukhris.

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Available for the Opening Ceremony on YouTube channels

After a series of roundtables and presentations, participants will be able to engage in solution sessions on Pasteur Network strategic axes: (1) reinforcing epidemic intelligence and preparedness with a specific focus on climate sensitivity; (2) supporting the research, development, and innovation ecosystem in critical diagnostics, vaccines, and therapeutics; (3) creating multi-disciplinary knowledge communities; and (4) equitable collaboration, and sustainability.

This year, the meeting will also provide a platform for young scientists from all the regions of the Pasteur Network to present their research focused on the key thematic areas.

A visit to the Institut Pasteur de Tunis and a cultural tour are also included in the programme.

The PNAM 2023 is funded by the Pasteur Network, the Institut Pasteur de Tunis, and Wellcome.

About the Institut Pasteur de Tunis

The Institut Pasteur de Tunis (IPT) is a public health institution under the authority of the Ministry of Health of Tunisia. Its mission is to carry out epidemiological and clinical studies, biomedical investigations, as well as research activities pertaining to human and animal health. IPT also manufactures vaccines and sera for the needs of the country. Affiliated to the Université de Tunis El Manar, the institute contributes to higher education at both the national and regional levels.

The Institut Pasteur de Tunis is internationally recognized and collaborates with foreign scientific institutions.

Since its creation, in 1893 (the third Institut Pasteur after Paris and Hô-Chi-Minh-Ville), the institute has focused its research activities on infectious diseases of viral, bacterial and parasitological origin, including zoonotic and vector-borne diseases. It is also conducting research on snake envenoming, immune deficiencies, hemoglobinopathies and genetic diseases

Finally, IPT is also active in research projects involving several members of the Pasteur Network in Africa and Europe like REPAIR, PerMediNA, Atun-Dips, and Alliance SHS Afrique. For more information, visit the Institut Pasteur de Tunis’s official website.

Press contact: Hichem Ben Hassine / hichem.benhassine@pasteur.tn

About the Pasteur Network

The Pasteur Network is a vast human and scientific community with more than 30 members in over 20 countries contributing together to global health. Located in the heart of endemic areas, the Network has privileged access to a large number of pathogens that it monitors and studies on all five continents. This exceptional diversity makes the Pasteur Network a unique global actor in public health, science, innovation, and education, especially in the fight against infectious diseases.

Presse : Juliette Hardy / cominter@pasteur.fr

Complex global challenges are best addressed by unlocking the power of existing networks and empowering institutes anchored in local communities. This new partnership brings together Pasteur Network — a storied and unique organization covering a breadth of countries, people and public health challenges — with nonprofit GeoSeeq Foundation — an AI-powered platform for tracking emerging and circulating pathogens, microbial discovery and predictive modeling.

Paris and New York, October 31^st, 2023.

The threat of infectious diseases is constant and far-reaching, killing 14 million people annually. Changes in climate are exacerbating infectious disease threats, especially for water- and vector-borne diseases. These increased infectious disease threats are most often distributed in low- and middle-income countries, which experience annual surges in dengue virus, malaria, cholera and other infections. While prevention is the ideal approach to controlling infectious diseases, there is limited cross-border surveillance and coordination to drive prevention and response. Furthermore, despite recent lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic, there is still no global system for infectious disease monitoring. Instead, existing platforms are siloed and single-modality or single-region focused.

Today, Pasteur Network and the GeoSeeq Foundation are announcing a partnership to usher in a new era of global pathogen monitoring and response, supporting the Pasteur Network’s 32 institutes distributed across 25 countries on five continents and powered by Biotia’s GeoSeeq platform, an AI platform leveraging diverse data streams, including climate, genomics and public health data. This partnership is facilitating new, equitable solutions for data sharing, cross-entity discovery and pathogen tracking to drive analytics and predictive models that flag circulating and emerging threats.

The partners are tackling challenges ranging from data governance (using a federated storage-based approach), platform and model development (empowering community-driven model development) to interpretation of signals working with local governments and translation to actionable insights, equity, funding and implementation. It is expected that this partnership will have an outsized impact in the Global South — as 75% of Pasteur Network members work in laboratories for the ministries of health in the low and middle-income countries (LMICs) — with an initial focus on vector-borne diseases of dengue virus and malaria.

“This partnership marks an important step toward unlocking untapped potential across a leading global infectious disease network”, said Dr. Rebecca Grais, executive director of Pasteur Network. “Unlocking network potential can transform separate initiatives into a global engine of discovery and more equitable, actionable public health information”.

GeoSeeq is designed to overcome cross-border data-sharing challenges and preserve data sovereignty while still allowing data to be indexed and connected on a common platform. With this capability, the partners anticipate connecting more than 40 million data points over the next three years. This will drive new collaborations, facilitate discovery and enhance response to infectious disease threats. It will also enable impactful data-driven health responses, create new infectious disease dashboards for ministries of health and support the development of novel therapeutics, biological discoveries and vaccine design.

“Through this partnership, we are launching an ambitious, open and dedicated international effort”, said Dr. Christopher Mason, president and cofounder of the GeoSeeq Foundation. “Pathogens move readily across nations’ borders; thus, collaboration should also seamlessly move internationally between scientists, physicians and policymakers. This partnership is an essential step toward making this vision a reality”.

“Too often, groups feel isolated in their fight against infectious diseases”, said Dr. Amadou Sall, director general of the Institut Pasteur de Dakar and president of Pasteur Network. “This partnership helps to level the playing field, providing support and tools for local groups to tackle regional problems that affect their local communities”.

The Pasteur Network is a vast human and scientific community with more than 30 members in over 20 countries contributing together to global health. Located in the heart of endemic areas, the network has privileged access to a large number of pathogens that it monitors and studies on all five continents. This exceptional diversity makes the Pasteur Network a unique global actor in public health, science, innovation and education, especially in the fight against infectious diseases.

Connect on LinkedIn.

GeoSeeq Foundation is a nonprofit empowering infectious disease researchers and public health agencies globally to track, understand and control infectious disease threats.
Connect on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

• Juliette Hardy, Pasteur Network, +33 6 19 36 46 45, cominter@pasteur.fr,
  https://pasteur-network.org
• Lathum Nelson, GeoSeeq Foundation, (385) 743-1724, lathum.nelson@stagemarketing.com, https://www.geoseeq.com/

From 28 to 30 November 2022 the Annual Meeting of the Pasteur Network co-organized with the Institut Pasteur Italia will take place at Sapienza University in Rome. This meeting will bring together all directors, scientific directors and researchers of more than 30 Pasteur Network members in the world, located in over 20 countries across 5 continents. The theme this year is “The Start of a New Chapter”, which reflects the recent development of the Pasteur Network aiming for a more inclusive and participative governance.

The inaugural day will take place on Monday 28 November starting at 11:30 in the Aula Magna with the participation of Prof. Antonella Polimeni, Rector of Sapienza University of Rome, Prof. Luigi Frati, President of the Istituto Pasteur Italia Cenci Bolognetti Foundation, the French Ambassador in Italy Prof. Christian Masset, Prof. Silvio Brusaferro, President of the Istituto Superiore di Sanità and Prof. Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2008 and Honorary President of the Pasteur Network.

The new vision of the Pasteur Network will be presented by Dr. Rebecca F. Grais, the new Executive Director of the Pasteur Network with Prof. Amadou Sall, President of the Pasteur Network and Prof. Stewart Cole, President of the Pasteur Network Foundation.

The keynote speaker of the session “The new vision of the Pasteur Network” will be Prof. Rino Rappuoli, Scientific Director of the Siena Biotecnopolo Foundation who will deliver a lecture on “The miracle of COVID-19 vaccines and the trillion-dollar gap” to illustrate how new technologies and unprecedented public investment have transformed vaccine development and allowed fast delivery of safe and efficacious COVID-19 vaccines, mitigating the impact of the pandemic on health and the economy. A quantum change in public investment for vaccine development and widespread vaccine distribution are necessary to achieve global pandemic preparedness.

An exhibition “From Louis to Pasteur: 1822-1895” will run in parallel to celebrate 200th anniversary of the birth of Louis Pasteur.

On Tuesday 29^th and Wednesday 30^th, working sessions organized for members of the Pasteur Network will deal with its main strategic priorities such as epidemic intelligence and preparedness, and research and development to support regional manufacturing of diagnostics, vaccines, and therapeutics. The Pasteur Network also supports thecreation of diverse collaborative multi-disciplinary communities of knowledge which will be discussed during a session called “Working Together” that illustrates the leitmotiv of the entire event.

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For more information:

About Istituto Pasteur Italia
Istituto Pasteur Italia, part of the Pasteur Network, is committed to promotion of biomedical research, scientific education and dissemination. The research activity is mainly focused on understanding the mechanisms underlying the biological processes with the goal of expanding our knowledge on the molecular basis of many infectious and non-communicable diseases.
istitutopasteuritalia.it

About the Pasteur Network
The Pasteur Network is a vast human and scientific community with more than 30 members in over 20 countries who together contribute to the improvement of global health. Located in the heart of endemic areas, the Network has privileged access to a large number of pathogens that it monitors and studies on all five continents. This exceptional diversity makes the Pasteur Network a global actor in public health, science, innovation, and education, especially in the fight against infectious diseases.
pasteur-network.org
The Institut Pasteur International Network is evolving and becoming the Pasteur Network (2021)

Memorandum of Understanding (MoU)

Washington, D.C., Paris | July 26, 2022 – The Rockefeller Foundation’s Pandemic Prevention Institute (PPI) and the Pasteur Network have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to advance early detection and reporting for emerging and re-emerging diseases and build a robust decentralized global surveillance network that strengthens local capacity for sharing high-quality data across countries.
The collaboration aims to enhance the effectiveness of the Pandemic Prevention Institute and the Pasteur Network’s 33 member institutions in both addressing infectious diseases, such as COVID-19 and Monkeypox, and informing interventions against them.

“Our work with the Pasteur Network will undoubtedly make a transformational impact on global health security, leveraging the ability to advance equitable data-sharing practices that will provide key stakeholders and decision-makers with timely, more accurate and relevant information to make critical health and policy decisions,” said Dr. Rick Bright, CEO of The Rockefeller Foundation’s Pandemic Prevention Institute. “Our collective aim is to advance access to pathogen surveillance, genomic sequencing, analytics, and data sharing tools in low- and middle-income countries and to foster sentinel laboratory networks for early disease detection.”

“This MoU is a major milestone in our collaboration with The Rockefeller Foundation and the PPI that could lead to significant impact in epidemic and pandemic preparedness. Together, the Pasteur Network and PPI are an effective combination of complementary talents and capacity to address global health threats said Dr. Amadou Sall, President of the Pasteur Network.

“We are proud to support this initiative. This important, historic partnership will provide much-needed support to capacity building and epidemic intelligence,” said Professor Stewart Cole, President of the Pasteur Network Foundation that contributes to the Pasteur Network’s development.

Over the coming years, the partnership will focus primarily on the following areas:

• Advancing global equitable data sharing to provide key stakeholders and decision-makers with an analytical toolset that leverages timely, more accurate and relevant data and information,
• Bolstering epidemiological and genomic surveillance in low- and middle-income countries to track emerging pathogen variants and transmission for real-time analyses, as well as advancing access to pathogen surveillance and analytical tools, such as digital apps,
• Enhancing discovery of emerging and re-emerging high consequence pathogens, generating a diversity of essential disease surveillance data streams in areas such as zoonosis, anti-microbial resistance and water borne diseases and,
• Building fit for purpose data analytics and disease discovery and forecasting systems, informed by the organizations’ partner networks, that are relevant, sustainable, and equitable at the local, state, and pan-regional level.

The partnership will also focus on interdisciplinary research projects addressing the causes of outbreaks and epidemics. The combined networks will maintain local and regional structures to foster a permanent operational force and share technologies, systems, practices, and techniques with their networks.

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About the Pasteur Network

Pasteur Network, previously known as the Institut Pasteur International Network, is a worldwide network of members which contribute to global health. This unique model of cooperation brings together, beyond the independent public or private structures that form the Network, a human and scientific community collectively mobilized for both local, regional and global health priorities. The members of Pasteur Network share the same mission to improve health through biomedical research, public health activities, training, and innovation.
For more information, visit our members dedicated webpage and follow us on LinkedIn and on the Institut Pasteur’s Twitter.

About the Pandemic Prevention Institute

The Rockefeller Foundation’s Pandemic Prevention Institute (PPI) is mission-driven to contribute to the crucial work of building systems that detect, prevent, and mitigate pandemic threats, leading to rapid, effective containment. PPI is pursuing its mission through the integration of cutting-edge technology and analytic approaches that turn data into action that drives life-saving decisions; a federated network of data users and holders with global representation; and collaborative leadership at the global level.
For more information on partners, data solutions and more visit the PPI official website and follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

About The Rockefeller Foundation

The Rockefeller Foundation is a pioneering philanthropy built on collaborative partnerships at the frontiers of science, technology, and innovation to enable individuals, families, and communities to flourish. We work to promote the well-being of humanity and make opportunity universal. Our focus is on scaling renewable energy for all, stimulating economic mobility, and ensuring equitable access to healthy and nutritious food.
For more information, sign up for our newsletter at rockefellerfoundation.org and follow us on Twitter.

Media Contacts:

Mike Hayes
VP Communications / CCO, Pandemic Prevention Institute
mhayes@rockfound.org | +1 703-740-6981

Juliette Hardy
Head of Communications, Pasteur Network
juliette.hardy@pasteur.fr

Original publication on July 26^th 2022. Updated on September 27^th, 2022.