From Indonesia to Peru - TANDEM circles the Globe

The ‘Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia’ (UPCH) welcomed TANDEM team members with open arms for the consortium’s final progress meeting, which took place in Lima, Peru from 16-18th May, 2017.

The event was conveniently hosted at UPCH’s campus in Miraflores, where everything – hotel, restaurants and meeting venue – was easily within walking distance. Project partners who arrived a day ahead of the meeting had the opportunity to visit the university’s main campus where the TANDEM-TB laboratory is situated, together with some of the most sophisticated laboratory infrastructure in Peru. After meeting with the university’s research coordinator and the TB research laboratory, they visited the ‘Hospital Huaycan’ which was one of the four TANDEM-TB sites for patient recruitment, thus providing the necessary data for the project study.

This concluded the series of field site visits that have taken place annually throughout the four and a half years of the TANDEM project duration. What started with a visit to Stellenbosch University in Cape Town, South Africa, in 2014, was then continued every year and included visits to Padjadjaran University in Bandung, Indonesia as well as to Craiova’s University of Medicine and Pharmacy in Romania.

In the course of the progress meeting, it became clear that a substantial amount of work has successfully been completed during the project, with valuable sets of collected and analysed data in TANDEM. Extensive scientific discussions and work group meetings outlined the steps necessary to finalise the project, and seek out possibilities to maintain collaborations after its conclusion.

Everybody agreed that working together in TANDEM has been a great experience. Or as one consortium member put it: “TANDEM has been more collaborative than any other project I have been involved in!”

The meeting proved to be a great success, not least thanks to the excellent organisation and warm hospitality of the UPCH team.