Conference, sponsored by SUNY Upstate Medical University, will be held Aug. 7 through 9
SYRACUSE, N.Y.— Some of the world’s leading experts on dengue, including those responding to the current dengue crisis and those developing vaccines and other countermeasures to fight the disease, will participate in an international dengue summit Aug. 7 through 9 at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, N.Y.
The summit comes at a time when dengue cases have soared worldwide. “Global incidence of dengue in 2024 has been the highest on record for this calendar year,” according to CDC. More than 9 million cases of dengue have been reported in the Americas in the first half of 2024; that’s twice as high as the number of cases recorded in 2023.
Officials in the United States are growing more concerned that they may see a steady increase in cases. Already this year, Florida health officials have issued an alert in the Florida Keys after cases of dengue fever were confirmed to have been contracted locally, not through travel.
Dengue is a disease spread by infected Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus mosquitos that infect an estimated 400 million people every year. The severity of dengue can range anywhere from mild flu-like symptoms to life-threatening dengue hemorrhagic fever. Reports show that 20,000 people die from dengue virus infections annually.
Conference organizer and infectious disease expert Upstate’s Adam Waickman, PhD, hopes the conference will make significant strides to developing a “dengue endgame.”
“This conference will bring together experts from various fields—basic scientists, physicians, counter measure developers, policymakers and other stake holders—to discuss progress and strategies for achieving a true dengue endgame,” said Waickman, Upstate assistant professor of microbiology and immunology and laboratory director of Upstate’s Global Health Institute.
Leading the list of key presenters is virologist Scott Halstead, MD, considered one of the foremost authorities on dengue and other mosquito-borne diseases, who will deliver the keynote address “Dengue: confronting the pandemic” Aug. 7 at 3:40 p.m. Halstead began his research on dengue in the early 1960s. In 1967 he presented the first paper describing severe dengue hemorrhagic fever as the result of a second infection by one of the other four types of dengue.
Notables joining Halstead as presenters include:
—Derek Cummings, PhD, professor in the Department of Epidemiology of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. As a presenter at the March 2024 meeting of the U.S. President’s Council of Science Advisors and Technology, Cummings reported that the prevalence of dengue in the Western Hemisphere has increased significantly in the 1980s, and that over the next 60 years, dengue will spread from into from southeastern United States into the Midwest and up the Atlantic coast.
—Sir Jeremy Farrar, DPhil, chief scientific officer of the World Health Organization. In a previous post, he served as director of the Clinical Research Unit at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in Viet Nam, where his research interests were in global health with a focus on emerging infectious diseases.
—Eng Eong Ooi, MD, PhD, professor in the Signature Research Program in Emerging Infectious Diseases at Duke-NUS (National University of Singapore) Medical School.
—Derek Wallace, president of the Global Vaccine Business Unit at Takeda Pharmaceuticals, one of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies in the world. Earlier this year, Takeda partnered with India’s Biological E. Limited to boost dengue vaccine production.
—Brigid Wills, MD, professor of tropical medicine and honorary consultant in pediatrics at the Centre for Tropical Medicine and Global Health, University of Oxford. Wills’s clinical research focuses primarily on dengue and incorporates studies designed to improve dengue diagnosis and risk prediction for severe disease.
Presenters from Upstate include Kathryn Anderson, MD, PhD; Adam Waickman, PhD; Saravanan Thangamani, PhD; Frank Middleton, PhD; Telisa Stewart, MPH, DrPH; Jana Shaw, MD; and Stephen Thomas, MD.
A complete schedule of the conference is available here.
The conference will be held in the KG Tan Auditorium of the National Veterans Center in Syracuse.
Dengue research at Upstate
When it comes to dengue research, Upstate Medical University has made progress on the research front by advancing the development of a Dengue Human Infection Model (DHIM) that is expected to be used widely by drug makers to advance the development of safe and effective vaccines against the dengue viruses.
“We have demonstrated the ability to safely and consistently infect people with a weakened dengue virus, generate a mild dengue-like illness, and then study how the virus and human immune system interact,” said the program’s principal investigator, Stephen Thomas, the Frank E. Young, MD ’56 and Leanne Young Endowed Chair of Microbiology and director of Upstate’s Global Health Institute “This dengue human infection model is actively being used to test vaccines and drugs.”
Within the first month of receiving the injection of the virus, all participants had reported mild to moderate symptoms consistent with dengue including headache, muscle aches, and fatigue. All volunteers had detectable levels of the virus in their bloodstream. Researchers used blood samples taken after infection to intensely characterize how the virus replicated and how the immune system responded to the virus.
The Upstate research team hopes this new Dengue Human Infection Model accelerates vaccine and drug development and starts to lessen the global dengue burden.
In addition to this groundbreaking work on Dengue Human Infection Models, researchers at Upstate are also seeking to better understand the complexity of natural dengue transmission, immunity, and pathogenesis.
Building on 30 years of collaborative research with the U.S. Army and various academic partners, Upstate has established an unprecedented long-term cohort study to define dengue virus transmission, pathogenesis, and immunity within multigenerational households in Kamphaeng Phet, Thailand. With funding from the National Institutes of Health and the US Army, this group has completed nine years of continuous surveillance (as of 2024) and intend to continue for many more. This cohort seeks to disentangle the complexities of protective and pathological dengue virus immunity in the face of sequential dengue and non-dengue virus flavivirus exposures, over time and with aging, and in the contexts of viral evolution. The study also provides a critical platform for field application and evaluation of novel technologies such as multiplexed profiling of antibodies in saliva. The cohort also serves as an invaluable source of highly characterized, high quality biological specimens for advanced immunological and virological analyses.
