With a Participation of more than 1200 Delegates Hamdan Medical Award Hold its Second Webinar
16 March 2023
Sheikh Hamdan bin Rashid Al Maktoum Award for Medical Sciences held the second webinar in its Winner’s Webinar series. This series features several webinars on the topic of infectious diseases, where some of the winners of the 12th term of the Awards share their diverse experience and knowledge with the participants.
The current webinar was attended by more than 1200 delegates from 25 country. All attendees received 1 CME credit hour accredited by the University of UAE.
The webinar featured a talk by Prof. David Ho on the antibody evasion properties of SARS-CoV-2 variants. Prof. Ho is the Professor of Medicine and Founding Scientific Director of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. Prof. Ho was the winner of the Hamdan Award for Medical Research Excellence on the topic of immunity in the 12th term of the Award. The webinar was chaired by Prof. Taher Rizvi, Professor of Molecular Virology at UAE University, Director of the Zayed bin Sultan al Nahyan Center for Health Sciences and Member of the Mohamed bin Rashid Academy of Scientists.
During the webinar Prof. Dr. David Ho spoke about the development of the COVID-19 pandemic over the past three years, and how the scientific community has responded by producing effective treatments and rapid preventive measures, including highly protective vaccines against the causative agent SARS-CoV-2. He also discussed the continued evolution of the virus and the generation of antibody-resistant variants that are able to spread more efficiently. He spoke about the challenges posed by variants such as beta and delta. The Omicron variant and its submutants (BQ.1.1 and XBB.1.5) show the most extreme resistance to authorized/approved monoclonal antibodies; these variants are also about 100 times more resistant to serum neutralization when compared to the precursor strain of SARS-CoV-2.
Based on this understanding of how the virus evolves, Prof. Ho talked about developing a new strategy for the action of antibodies that we can use to control the variables introduced in the future.
