Congratulations to Dr. Thuy Le, an Associate Director of the Duke CFAR Clinical Core, who received a 2.5 million dollar NIH U01 award to develop a Tropical Medicine Research Center (TMRC) for talaromycosis in Vietnam. Talaromycosis is an invasive fungal infection endemic in countries in Southeast Asia and is a leading cause of death in patients with advanced HIV disease. Current diagnosis relies on culturing the fungus from patients' specimens, which has low yield and takes up to 2 weeks, leading to treatment delay and a mortality despite antifungal therapy of 30%. The TMRC award will enable Dr. Le to partner with Vietnamese researchers at the Pham Ngoc Thach University of Medicine in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam to build the laboratory and clinical research capacity to advance a diagnostic pipeline for talaromycosis.
Dr. Le and her team have established an extensive network of collaborators in Vietnam and in Southeast Asia and have a pipeline of novel non-culture diagnostics to advance diagnostic modalities and knowledge of disease reservoir and transmission to humans. The studies proposed through the U01 aim to validate multiple non-culture diagnostics for talaromycosis and develop pathways for their clinical and public health applications. The studies have the potential to advance our understanding of disease reservoir and airborne transmission to humans and inform disease control at the individual and the population levels.
The U01 is one of the eight Tropical Medicine Research Centers funded by the NIH in the world, and is an important step for talaromycosis to be recognized as a Neglected Tropical Disease (NTD) at the NIH.
Says Dr. Le, “This Tropical Medicine Research Center for Talaromycosis award represents a personal milestone for me as a scientist – to seek beyond project-based funding to funding that will build laboratory infrastructure and clinical research capacity for future generations of scientists in this neglected area of research. The TMRC award also represents an important milestone for the disease, as we will be 1 of 8 NIH-funded Tropical Medicine Research Centers in the world that conduct research on the Neglected Tropical Diseases. Our main goal is to enable early diagnosis and treatment, and thus to reduce a leading cause of HIV-associated death.”
Photo caption: A patient with HIV and talaromycosis