Looking Back: COMBACTE General Assembly 2017, Brussels

This year’s COMBACTE General Assembly Meeting took place on March 14-16 in the historic and muticultural city of Brussels, Belgium. Once again, the General Assembly hosted a great 195 attendees from 13 countries.

The meeting kicked off with the general joint topic meeting on the first day, where updates on COMBACTE’s four core capability pillars  – CLIN-Net, LAB-Net, STAT-Net, and EPI-Net – were provided by the respective scientific leads. The goal of the four pillars is not only to support the projects within the COMBACTE consortium, but also to ensure its sustainability as an effective consortium in anti-bacterial drug development, laboratory practice standards, trial design, and epidemiology. The updates were followed by state-of-the-art lectures outside current projects that elaborated on solutions for the crisis of antibiotic resistance.

The following two days of the General Assembly focused on presentations from the different partners expanding on the three core projects of the COMBACTE consortium: COMBACTE-NET, COMBACTE-MAGNET, and COMBACTE-CARE. These presentations included scientific updates, status, achievements, and objectives of the different trials belonging to each project.

While updates on trials were taking place for the general audience, breakout sessions were also held with the study teams for specific trials. The goal of the breakout sessions was to enforce collaboration and create the opportunity for the study teams to discuss any immediate and challenging tasks within their respective projects.

After an intense yet fruitful second day, a network meeting event for all attendees was held at the Magritte Museum against the backdrop of the fascinating and surreal paintings of Rene Magritte. This was a great chance for everyone to evaluate the GA meeting thus far, interact with each other and reflect on future proceedings or discuss potential opportunities for further scientific collaboration.

This year the General Assembly turned out once more to be a highly successful, collaborative meeting where a good balance of updates, achievements, project timelines, and novel science were discussed. This meeting has once again reinforced the capability and potential of COMBACTE as a Public-Private consortium in the future of Antibacterial Drug Development. Even though there are still challenges to be tackled, the progress that has been made proves that COMBACTE is well on its way to the realization of the vision of ND4BB.

Below you can find the gallery of pictures taken during the General Assembly.