After a rather long hiatus for many of us after the COVID-19 pandemic (and while the pandemic was still going on in some form), we met for our first in-person international meeting on the campus of University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School in Worcester, Massachusetts, USA for “Anti-helmintics V: drugs, resistance, and vaccines.” The fifth meeting in this series has continued to attract interest from applied and basic science academics, post-docs, graduate students and industrial scientists who are interested in all aspects of controlling helminth parasite diseases of humans and animals. With nearly 100 attendees from all over the globe, the meeting miraculously happened with minimal interruption and inconvenience.
We were welcomed by Provost Dean Terence Flotte who opened the meeting and recognized the significance of the work that was being presented. Our invited speakers, Jennifer Keiser, Aaron Maule, Collette Britton, Vanessa Ezenwa, Ron Hokke, Amy Walker, Peter Roy, Cedric Neveu, Marian Walhout and Alex Byrne gave excellent presentations with insights into current developments in their fields of study. Amy Walker talked about exploring characteristics in “Exploring Unknowns” in nematodes; Aaron Maule talked about flatworm “Parasite Growth and Therapy”; Cedric Neveu talked about “Molecular Markers” to high throughput diagnostic tools for anthelmintic resistance; Marion Walhout talked about proprionate metabolism in Caenorhabditis elegans; Ron Hokke gave us an account of human schistosomiasis models for drug and vaccine development; Alex Byrne delved into the mechanisms of axon regeneration and degeneration in the model nematode, C. elegans; Collette Britton, who uses single-cell RNA sequencing,showed us how host-parasite interactions were being studied with these techniques; Jennifer Keiser described treatments for soil-transmitted helminthiasis; Peter Roy described some of his work on nematode selective potentiation of organophosphate and carbamate compounds; Vanessa Ezenwa provided information on her excellent work that included some of her field studies.
The invited speakers were followed by nearly 40 excellent oral presentations and nearly half that many posters at the poster session were presented, covering an amazing and rich array of helminth research from drug resistance, mechanism of anthelmintic action, parasite basic biology and development, novel anthelmintic development, clinical drug trials for human and veterinary medicine, antigen discovery and helminth vaccine development,and special talks from the UMass Chan Medical School C. elegans community in our continuing efforts to span the C. elegans–parasitic helminth divide.
It is important to recognize our sponsors, who made this event possible through their generosity. Support came from: Iowa State University; University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School; The International Journal for Parasitology; The Burroughs Wellcome Fund; Boehringer Ingelheim; Abbvie; Zoetis; Merck; and Elsevier. We thank them both for their support and scientific input into the meeting.
The level and novelty of the science presented was outstanding, as highlighted in the papers published from the meeting in this Special Issue. More importantly, in-person friendships were renewed, collaborations established, and the community was brought closer together in our joint vision of a world in which the ability of helminth parasites to impoverish those living in developing nations and to negatively impact the animals we rely on for sustenance and companionship is dimished or even one day eradicated.
The organizers of the meeting were Raffi Aroian (University of Massachuetts Chan Medical School) and Richard Martin (Iowa State University, USA) who were supported by the Scientific Advisory Committee of: Erik Andersen (Northwestern University, USA); Alex Loukas (James Cook University, Australia); Jonathan Marchant (Medical College of Wisconsin, USA); Angela Mousley (Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland); Paul Selzer (Boehringer Ingelheim Animal Health, Germany); Sabine Specht (Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative, Switzerland) and Mostafa Zamanian (University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA).
We hope you enjoy this issue as a sample of the excellence in helminth research presented, as well as a testament to the collaborative and community efforts associated with this effort to help bring health and healing to many of the poorest in the world. In the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. “In a real sense all life is inter-related. All … are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be… This is the inter-related structure of reality.” (Luther King, Jr., M., 1967. Christmas sermon on peace and nonviolence, Massey Lecture #5, Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, Georgia, USA).