22 Dec TBNET paper awarded science price 2014

AIGHD is pleased to announce that an article submitted by the TBNET consortium has just been awarded the science price for 2014 from the consortium of funders for science in Germany (Stifterverband der deutschen Wissenschaft). The article published in the European Respiratory Journal is entitled Management of patients with multidrug resistant/extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis in Europe: a TBNET consensus statement.

The award is made for an article reflecting an outstanding contribution in science to society. Nominations are made by the Directors of the 89 Leibniz institutes and cover all disciplines of science. The prize money of 50.000 Euros will be used for future TBNET projects. The consortium itself has no core funding and all scientists contribute in kind. Over 500 persons, including the new EU Commissioner for Science, the Federal Minister of Science of Germany, Presidents of German Universities, and Parliamentarians were present at the award ceremony in Berlin last week.

The TBNET consortium, for which Frank van Leth of AIGHD is a core collaborator, aims to ensure that clinical research can access patients across Europe to create a critical mass of patients and researchers for European TB research. TBNET and AIGHD are part of the FP-7 project on multi-drug resistant tuberculosis. One of the tasks of the consortium is to provide consensus statements in fields where not enough evidence is present for a formal meta-analysis. The results of the very first TBNET project were recently published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Management.