Communicable E60: Quarterly catch-up (August 2026 edition)

Hello, communicable listeners.

I'm Angela Huttner, editor-in-chief of CMI Communications and clinical trial enthusiast.

I've got a couple of fellow enthusiasts with me, Josh Davis and Steve Tong, to tell you about a postgraduate education course we've planned for this November in Malta.

This is a two and a half days, so Thursday, Friday, and half day Saturday.

The content is aimed at anyone who wants to do clinical trials, and it really answers the question, how do I do a clinical trial? How do you generate an idea? How do you take that idea and turn it into a protocol? How do you then operationalize that into a trial? And then right at the other end, how do you turn that into a paper and get it published? So in the mornings, we'll have talks and in the afternoons, it will be workshops where you can bring along your own trial ideas and the faculty can help you develop them.

Steve, who are some of the faculty who will be teaching at this course?

There's great faculty, yourselves, Angela, and Josh as well.

David Patterson of Merino, Tom Holland of DOTS, and eradicate Henry van Verkoven to talk about the basics of frequentist analysis, and Sarah Walker on the basics of Bayesian analysis.

And those topics are becoming increasingly important as we conduct more and more trials with a Bayesian focus.

Josh, what are some of your highlights?

For me, there's a talk on AI in clinical trials and what role it might play in helping to design trials, but also trials of assessing the role of AI.

And I'm also really looking forward to just hearing people's proposals for new trials, because we all have different ways of thinking about things and different ways we would approach things.

The course is a clarity initiative, but it's got some great support from various organisations.

It's being organised by CMI Communications and ESCMID, and the sponsors are Advance ID, based in Singapore and Southeast Asia, the US-based Antibacterial Resistance Leadership Group, ARLG, the Australasian Society for Infectious Diseases, that's ACID, ECRAID, the European Clinical Research Alliance on Infectious Diseases, and SIDP, the Society of ID Pharmacists from the US.

So come and be with us in Malta.

Apparently it has direct flights from roughly 100 cities across 36 countries, so it's not hard to get to.

You can sign up for the course at ESCMID's website for postgraduate education courses.

We hope to see you all there, so snap to it and get registered.

Thanks for listening.

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