Advanced TB Diagnostics | June 2-6, 2025

“The freshness of the content. It felt like a conference. The openness and access to speakers AND the rich and very engaging panel discussions.”

- Advanced TB Diagnostics course participant

COURSE FORMAT

Online only. Course will be live to online participants approximately 9:00 AM to 12:00 PM (Montreal time) each day June 2–6, 2025. All content will be recorded and accessible to participants until July 1, 2025.

DESCRIPTION

This advanced course will cover topics in TB diagnostics research and implementation, including pipeline of innovations, critical pathway for new TB tests, impact of new tests on clinical decision-making and therapeutic choices, cost-effectiveness in routine programmatic settings, and impact on patient-important outcomes. The course will also cover meta-analysis, mathematical modeling, and cost-effectiveness studies. Panel discussions will cover topics such as value chain for TB diagnostics development, market analyses, market dynamics, target product profiles, and barriers to scale-up of new diagnostics. Participants will include TB survivors, product manufacturers, donors, product development partnerships, policy makers, academics, clinicians, community advocates, public health implementers and National TB Program managers.

COURSE DIRECTOR

Madhukar Pai, MD, PhD
Chair, Department of Global and Public Health, School of Population and Global Health, McGill University
Canada Research Chair of Epidemiology & Global Health, McGill University
Former Director, McGill International TB Centre

Mikashmi Kohli, PhD                                                                                                                                                                                                  Senior Scientist, FIND, Geneva

CONTENT

Diagnosis is one of the biggest gaps in the TB cascade of care. We need better tools for TB diagnosis than what we have today, and we need high quality diagnostic studies to evaluate new tools, and to develop evidence-based policies on TB diagnostics. We need data on outcomes such as accuracy of diagnostic algorithms (rather than single tests) and their relative contributions to the healthcare system, incremental value of new tests, impact of new tests on clinical decision-making and therapeutic choices, cost-effectiveness in routine programmatic settings, and impact on patient important outcomes. Translation of policy into impact requires collecting evidence for scale-up, country-level data on cost effectiveness and feasibility, implementation research, and local decisions on scale-up, delivery and impact assessment. All of these issues will be covered in this advanced course.

OBJECTIVES

By the end of the course, participants will understand:

• Value chain for TB diagnostics development, current pipeline of diagnostics, market dynamics, WHO policies on new diagnostics, and challenges for scale-up
• Designs to evaluate impact of new tests on clinical decision making, therapeutic choices, and patient-important outcomes
• Meta-analyses of diagnostic accuracy studies and GRADE approach to diagnostic policies
• Principles of implementation research, collecting evidence for scale-up, cost-effectiveness analyses and modeling studies in TB diagnostics

TARGET AUDIENCE

• National TB Program managers and National Reference Lab managers
• Clinicians and nurses
• Researchers, students, trainees, fellows and academics involved in TB diagnostics research
• Product manufacturers
• Funding agencies
• Product development partnerships
• Policy makers and public health implementers
• Community advocates and civil society

ENROLMENT

Limited to 100 online participants.