Zoltan Maliga Strengthens TB Collaborations in South Africa

This past month Zoltan Maliga, Scientific Director of Tissue Imaging at the LSP, visited South Africa to support ongoing collaborations sponsored by a Gates Foundation award. Centered around a presentation at the Keystone Symposium for Tuberculosis, the trip was an opportunity to share progress on a tissue atlas of pulmonary TB pathology built at the LSP by Emmanuel Ogbonna, Soheil Talemi, and Ziyuan Zhao. A short visit to the African Health Research Institute in Durban strengthened the collaboration between the LSP and Professors Adrie Steyn and Threnesan Naidoo at the Institute to use CyCIF and machine learning approaches to investigate TB pathology in clinical samples.

Zoltan also spent time visiting the University of Cape Town, the site of an LSP partnership with the African Microscopy Initiative to build the university's indigenous research capacity, enabling Dr. Michael Reich and his team to collect and analyze tissue CyCIF data with the local scientific community. On his final day, Zoltan presented a research seminar on “Spatial Approaches at the LSP to Study Infectious Disease and Cancer in Tissues" at the University of Cape Town, with virtual participation from colleagues at the University of Stellenbosch. The trip was a great success, highlighting the ever-growing need for collaboration across the worldwide scientific community.