An Education Opportunity for Transplant and Oncology Infections

Shmuel Shoham, MD, professor of clinical medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, was looking for a course for transplant and oncology infectious diseases. When he couldn’t locate one, he and his team developed one.

Specifically, Johns Hopkins Medicine is offering its new course, the Pamela Tucker Course in Transplant & Oncology Infectious Diseases, on infectious complications in patients undergoing transplant (solid organ and stem cell) and patients with cancer.

“We worked together to create one that starts from the bottom in terms of what patients, doctors, and clinicians can expect in terms of transplantation, in terms of oncology, from the oncologists and the surgeons and the physicians' side and then what can be expected from the infectious disease side,” Shoham said.

This will be a 2-day, in-person educational activity held from September 8 to 9 at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center, which is located at 555 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, DC.

The course will expand expertise on infectious complications in patients undergoing transplant (solid organ and stem cell) and patients with cancer. It will feature lectures from experts in the field and provide attendees with the knowledge and skills to provide infectious diseases care to patients undergoing transplant and those with cancer.

“We'll be talking about how organisms get to the places where they don't belong, the impact of resistance, antibacterial and antifungal resistance on those infections, and then have people really know what infections to expect,” Shoham said. “Also, viral infections are huge. So we'll have world experts in CMV [cytomegalovirus], other herpes virus infections, and respiratory viral infections talking about how those infections happen, how to prevent them, how to manage them—cutting-edge approaches to diagnosis and treatment.”

Shoham also said they are going to be covering xenotransplantation infections.

This activity has been approved for AMA PRA Category 1 Credits. For those who are interested in learning more or signing up for the course, clinicians can go here.