East, West, Vilnius (?!) is best… Part 1

On our way to Vilnius

Lodz-Vilnius route. 600 kilometres, 8-10 hours ride considering breaks for meal, refuel or just few minutes of relaxation. But our trip was a little bit extended because we decided to watch EURO 2016 game between Poland and Switzerland. Our footballers also decided to outlast us in front of TV one hour longer – they played extra time and penalties. The luck was on our side that day. We watched the game, won and we even were happy that we arrived to Vilnius at  1 a.m., but surprise – changing the clocks and it was 2 a.m… What is more, the conference was starting at Sunday morning. Yeah – You’re reading correctly – Sunday during tha vacation! However, we cannot complain because it was worth losing few hours of sleep!

Baltic Antiviral Network – well-known faces in unknown place

We know well most members of Baltic Antiviral Network from last year’s meeting in Moscow. One of them was Saleem Kamili (CDC, Atlanta, USA), who shared with listeners his knowledge about HBV virus. Statistics show that it is a danger, which we cannot ignore. Why? Since 1963, the year when the virus was detected, it stealed from 75 to even 160 millions of lifes. It is transported by blood, sexually and prenatally. Mutant forms of hepatitis B virus are capable of escaping neutralization by vaccination or emerge as a result of antiviral therapy leading to drug resistance. Lack of detection of HBV mutants by standard HBsAg diagnostic assays may pose the problem of their entry into the blood supply and infect vaccinated recipients of blood products.

During the conference very active was Anders Widell  (Lund University, Sweden), with whom we had an interview on a very hot topic, aspecially before Olympic Games in Rio – Zika virus. So that we don’t focus on that case in this article. He had also second presentation, which focused on hepatitis A – one of the most frequent foodborne infections, which is caused by poor sanitary conditions of food. Lecturer emphasizes that the most often disease assumes mild, stable and asymptomatic form, but there are also extreme situations when it becomes chronic and threaten our lifes.

Lars Frelin (Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden) presented the topic „Improving vaccine immunogenicity and development of new animal models of HCV infections”. The hepatitis C virus is a major cause for chronic liver disease worldwide. Despite effective therapies, it is estimated that only 10% of all chronic HCV infected individuals receive any therapy. Lars Frelin’s team is trying to improve these bad statistics. They showed that optimized HCV NS3/4A vaccine in combination with IVIN delivery significantly improves the vaccine immunogenicity.

Jan Drobeniuc (CDC, Atlanta, USA) was also talking about HBV and HCV calling them – silent epidemics. Just look at some numbers - globally, an estimated 8 millions new hepatitis B and C infections occur annually, and 390 million people are living with chronic hepatitis B and C. There are almost one million HBV-, or HCV- related deaths. Despite this sad statistics, over the last 15 years the incidence of acute hepatitis B decreased dramatically due to successful hepatitis B vaccination programs and acute hepatitis C also occurs less often with the introduction of blood donations screening and wide awareness campaigns. Jan Drobeniuc was leading a lecture about HEV too and because of poor knowledge about this virus, we decided to explore the topic in separate interview and you will be able to read and watch it on our websites and youtube channel later on.

We also met our compatriot, living in France – Agata Budkowska (Pasteur Institute, Paris, France). Imagine that you are watching a foreign movie and during final credits you are recognising a surname from your nationality (it can be scriptwriter, graphic designer, sound technician etc). With no reason, You’re very happy. We had identical situation browsing the conference programme and seeing polish surname. Meeting with professor Budkowska was really valuable for us, maliny because it is very difficult to arrange an appointment with her in Poland. We were talking privately, during lunches, but also more formal, which result another interview, this time about HCV. It related to her lecture – she sum up previous knowledge about hepatitis C since it had been discovered 27 years ago, numerated problems connected with treatment and making vaccines. In my opinion, it performers very well because she immediately invited us to Pasteur Institute and we hope we will be able to visit her in Paris. 

Like I mention, BAN meeting was a part of bigger event – Vilnius Communicable Disease Week, which will be a main topic of part 2 of our photostory. Saulius Caplinskas (Centre for Communicable Diseases and AIDS, Vilnius, Lithuania) was responsible for the whole conference. He was also a lecturer and he presented various topics connected with communicable diseases, not only HIV and AIDS, in other words, subjects of his research. For example, he was talking about side reactions to vaccines in Lithuania last year, I mean – about undesirable and negative response of the organism to medical preparation manifesting during the use of the usual dose of a registered medicine. World Health Organization, which also supported the conference via their participation, classifies SRV as fatal, dangerous to life, causing a need for treatment, hospitalization or prolongation of hospital treatment disease and affecting permanent working disability. Moreover, he brought listeners closer a case of influenza vaccination during pregnancy. Vaccination against influenza can reduce the risk for influenza-related illness among pregnant women and their infants, but unfortunately only less than 1% pregnant women got influenza vaccination in Lithuania in 2014-2015. He had also few other lectures but it is impossible to write about all of them.

Behind closed door

BAN meeting lasted three days. First two days were destined for lectures and poster presentations and the last one – closed session, only for members of the Network. Like every member, we were asked to prepare short speach about our support for BAN during last months. Personally, I represented our media showing our colleagues some articles, which were written after last year’s conference in Moscow. This texts were enriched with short films on our youtube channel. Except typical press report, we were also focused on articles about one particular issue, for example Chikungunya virus, iLiver application or HIV and HCV infections among drug users. I presented our rich photo collection from the capital of Russia too and then I praised our websites for statistics and our quarterly for new layout. There is no reason to be modest! We also indicated our plans after the conference in Vilnius and during vacation we are planning to present you series of multimedia interviews in completely new, richer form. We don’t want to say anything more about that – we prefer action rather than only talking about intentions.

After the meeting, we were talking with Maria Isaguliants (Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden and Stradins University, Riga, Latvia) about further plans of Network, knowing that Vilnius conference was the last one financed by Swedish funds – Our funding organization completely agrees with our activity, but I respect their decision that there are other institutes, centers which also need money to set up. There are a lot of different granting organizations oriented toward research, health care issues, international collaboration, open to different countries, like Lithuania, Latvia, Ukraine or Belarus. We’re trying to stimulate our members to look for these partnerships and come up with new partners - explained Isaguliants and she looked back to the beginning of the BAN in 2003 – We started with people whom we had known well, whom we had trusted and cooperated with earlier. It’s nothing special – you always start new thing that way. What is satisfying, these people are still the core of organization. Our Network is like a tree  - everyone brought his close people and we were building more and more branches of valuable contacts. We were also growing up with each other academically – at  the beginning our members were postdocs and now they are senior researches, they have their groups, their PhD students and these young people starts to cooperate with us and with each other.     

We will write more about whole Vilnius Communicable Disease Week in the next article, so keep looking. You also will find there short movie, which we did for You. 

Adam Zalewski