As part of the GIARP workshop (25.09 – 27.09) at the Robert Koch Institute, Labor Berlin was visited last week by a delegation of scientists from the Pediatric Infections Research Center (PIRC) in Tehran, Iran, the Robert Koch Institute and the Charité. This project is a collaboration between the Pediatric Infections Research Center (PIRC) in Iran, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) and the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine (BNITM) in Germany. The PIRC is an academic research center at the Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences in Tehran/Iran and is part of the Mofid Children’s Hospital. With 303 beds and over 17,900 inpatient admissions per year, the Mofid Children’s Hospital is an ideal location for research and epidemiological studies on infectious diseases, antibiotic resistance and consumption as well as vaccines. The PIRC has a specialized microbiology laboratory that performs routine automated blood culture testing, microbiological analysis, antimicrobial susceptibility testing and molecular and serological testing for the detection of viruses, bacteria, fungi and parasites in clinical samples.
This should also create the opportunity to develop joint solutions to the challenges of antibiotic resistance in order to combat it more effectively. Against this background, the project is also funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research in Germany and the Ministry of Science, Research and Technology in Iran. The aim of the project is to further strengthen experts from the clinical, epidemiological and laboratory fields in both countries for future research projects in the field of diagnostics and laboratory organization. A visit to our laboratories at the CVK was also met with great interest.
A delegation from the PIRC took part, including the institute’s director, Prof. Abdollah Karimi, the deputy director for education, Prof. Fatemeh Fallah, the deputy director for international affairs, Prof. Roxana Mansour-Ghanaiee, and the GIARP project manager in Iran, Dr. Masoud Alebouyeh, together with other scientists from the Robert Koch Institute and Charité. These are mainly specialists in pediatric infectious diseases, clinical microbiology and epidemiology. Under the guidance of Dr. Andreas Knaust, Head of Diagnostics Microbiology, and PD Dr. Dr. Andreas Weimann, Medical Director at the MVZ, there was first a joint round of introductions, in which an insight was also given into the processes and equipment of the departments at Labor Berlin.
Visitors also had the opportunity to ask questions and discuss the automation processes in our laboratories. During a subsequent tour of the microbiology department with Dr. Andreas Knaust, Dr. Rolf Schwarzer took over the infectious disease part of our laboratories and gave a tour of molecular diagnostics. During the tour of the Central Sample Acceptance Department with Dr. Felicitas Mockenhaupt, she highlighted not only the automated processes there, but also the essential manual processing of samples by the MTLs in the laboratories. She also explained HIV/hepatitis analysis at COBAS to the visitors. Dr. Bettina Eberspächer then gave the delegation a tour of the serology department, which was of particular interest to the PIRC representatives.
If you have any questions about the project, please contact Dr. Idesbald Boone (Robert Koch Institute, Department of Infection Epidemiology)