Investigating infectious disease outbreaks with nanopore sequencing

What will you learn

• The importance of real-time genomic characterization in tracking bacterial outbreaks and antimicrobial resistance profiles.
• Real-world applications of long-read sequencing and BugSeq analysis in clinical microbiology laboratories for swift investigation of bacterial community clusters.
• Gain insights into the role of long-read sequencing and BugSeq analysis in tracking plasmid transmissions and characterizing antibiotic resistance from bacterial isolates.

Who this may interest?

• Academic researchers
• Sequencing researchers
• Genomic researchers
• Lab supervisors
• Public health microbiologists

Speakers

Kyriaki Xanthopoulou

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Institute of Medical Microbiology, Immunology and Hygiene at the Medical Faculty of the University of Cologne (Germany)

Kyriaki’s work focuses on the contribution of mobile genetic elements to the spread of antibiotic resistance determinants, the use of long-read sequencing in the investigation of plasmid outbreaks and the molecular epidemiology of nosocomial pathogens. Kyriaki completed her PhD at the University of Cologne where she investigated the clonal dynamics of antibiotic-resistant nosocomial pathogens and antimicrobial resistance genes acquired by horizontal gene transfer.

  Christopher Lowe

Medical Microbiologist

Providence Health Care (Vancouver, Canada)

Christopher completed medical school at the University of British Columbia (UBC; Vancouver, Canada), and residency in Medical Microbiology at the University of Toronto (Canada). He has been a medical microbiologist and infection prevention and control physician at Providence Health Care since 2013. Within microbiology, his area of focus has been in clinical virology and molecular diagnostics, including clinical applications of next-generation sequencing (NGS). In addition to his clinical responsibilities, he has been the Program Director for the UBC Medical Microbiology Residency Training Program since 2015 and a Clinical Professor in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at UBC.

Gordon Ritchie

Molecular Scientist

Providence Health Care (Vancouver, Canada)

After completing his PhD in Experimental Medicine from UBC, Gordon spent 6 years at SKMC Hospital (Abu Dhabi, UAE) as a molecular scientist before moving to St. Paul’s Hospital (Vancouver, Canada), where he has spent the past 16 years. Gordon has over 10 years’ experience using NGS techniques for molecular diagnostics, authoring several publications that used NGS for bacterial and viral whole-genome sequencing and targeted amplicon sequencing for antiviral drug-resistance testing.

Sherif Nour

Director of Sales & Marketing

BugSeq (Vancouver, Canada)

Sherif leads Sales and Customer Success at BugSeq. His focus is in enabling labs to adopt and scale their sequencing through BugSeq’s premium bioinformatics platform and in-house expert support.

Aaron Pomerantz

Associate Director, Segment Marketing – Infectious and Applied Markets

Oxford Nanopore Technologies (Oxford, UK)

Aaron received his PhD from UC Berkeley (CA, USA) in the Department of Integrative Biology, employing genomics, genome-editing and bioimaging techniques in non-model organisms as well as utilizing in-field nanopore sequencing in the Amazon rainforest. In his role as Associate Director of Global Segment Marketing at Oxford Nanopore, he covers synthetic biology, microbiology and infectious disease.