On demand webinar

ISAC's Infections in the ICU and Sepsis Working Group held a webinar on Hot Topics on Infections in Critical Care.

Infections represent a major cause of morbidity and mortality in the critical care setting, especially in our era of multidrug-resistant pathogens. During the COVID19 pandemic, on the other hand, a significant increase in the prevalence of ICU infections has been reported. Prompt diagnosis of critical care infections and appropriate treatment in optimised doses, along with antibiotic stewardship, are of outmost importance for improved outcomes and tackling antimicrobial resistance development.
In this online event, internationally leading experts provided short presentations with up-to-date information on trending topics of infection and sepsis in critical care.

Programme

Introduction
Despoina Koulenti (Greece / Australia)

Diagnosis and management of severe community-acquired pneumonia
Antoni Torres (Spain)

Diagnosis and management of abdominal sepsis
Jan De Waele (Belgium)

Management of infections caused by MDR Gram-negative pathogens
Patrick Harris (Australia)

Management of S.aureus bacteremia
Stefan Hagel (Germany)

Viral infections in the Intensive Care Unit
Sotirios Tsiodras (Greece)

Role of biomarkers for sepsis diagnosis in critically ill patients
Pedro Povoa (Portugal)

Antibiotic de-escalation
Liesbet De Bus (Belgium)

Antibiotic stewardship (in COVID-19 era)
Jeroen Schouten (the Netherlands)

Therapeutic Drug Monitoring and antibiotic optimization in the Intensive Care Unit
Hafiz Abdul-Aziz (Australia)

Host-targeted immunotherapies in the Intensive Care Unit
Antoine Roquilly (France)

COVID-19 in haematological malignancies: outcome of infection and the effects of vaccination
Evangelos Terpos (Greece)

Ventilator associated pneumonia in COVID-19 patients
Andrew Conway Morris (UK)

Management of severe COVID19 infection
John Marshall (Canada)

Speaker bios

Moderator
Despoina Koulenti is a senior consultant of internal medicine & intensive care in Attikon University Hospital, Athens, Greece, and, also, affiliated with The University of Queensland (UQ), Australia. Her research interests focus on hospital-acquired infections and sepsis, especially in the critical care setting, and on severe respiratory infections. In 2012, she gained her PhD from the University of Athens on the topic of pneumonia in the ICU and subsequently, she joined the group of Professor Jeffrey Lipman in UQ, where she was awarded a post-doctoral Research Fellowship on critical care infections (‘Advancing infectious diseases research in critical care’). She has significant experience in designing and conducting international multicentre studies. From 2013 to 2019, she led the Pneumonia Working Group of ESICM.

Antoni Torres is a professor in medicine at the University of Barcelona (UB). He is considered a physician of reference both nationally and internationally in lung infections, including pneumonia, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), bronchiectasis, immunocompromised patients, weaning, noninvasive ventilation (NIV) and acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS-ALI). He leads the research group on management and prevention of infectious, interstitial and tumoral lung diseases of the August Pi i Sunyer Institute of Biomedical Research (IDIBAPS), from where he facilitates translational research studies.
He has taken part in many competitive research projects as principal researcher of the Health Care Research Fund (FIS). He coordinates a CIBER group on respiratory diseases (CibeRes) and takes part in the European projects, GRACE, MOSAR (WP3, WP4), H20250 etc.

Jan De Waele works as an intensivist at the Department of Critical Care Medicine of the Ghent University Hospital and is a full professor at Ghent University. He holds a Senior Clinical Investigator Fellowship Grant from the Research Foundation Flanders focusing on optimisation of antibiotic therapy in critically ill patients. He serves as Associate Editor at the Journal of Critical Care.
Prof. De Waele has authored or co-authored over 300 journal articles and book chapters. His research activities currently focus on optimising antibiotic therapy in severely ill infected patients, with a specific interest in PK/PD, therapeutic drug monitoring of antibiotics as well as antimicrobial stewardship.

Patrick Harris is an infectious disease physician, medical microbiologist and NHMRC Early Career Research Fellow at The University of Queensland Centre for Clinical Research (UQCCR). Dr Harris obtained a BSc in Psychology and Anthropology from Durham University prior to acquiring his medical degree from University College London Medical School. He was the lead author on the MERINO trial, reported in JAMA in 2018. This was an international multicentre randomised clinical trial (RCT) to compare carbapenem-sparing treatment options for ESBL and AmpC-producing species. His research has a focus on antibiotic resistant bacteria and the use of randomised clinical trials to define optimal treatment for these problematic infections as well as the application of bacterial genomics to clinical practice. 

Stefan Hagel graduated in 2005 from Jena Medical School, Germany. He is a specialist in internal medicine and infectious diseases and currently assistant medical director at the Institute for Infectious Diseases and Infection Control and Center for Sepsis Control and Care at the Jena University Hospital. His special interests include research in hospital epidemiology, S. aureus, multi-drug resistant organisms, C. difficile and infection control. He got his Master of Science in Clinical Research & Translational Medicine at the University of Leipzig and has performed several Investigator Initiated Trials as principal investigator in the field of infection control and antimicrobial therapy.

Sotirios Tsiodras is a professor of medicine and infectious diseases at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens Medical School. He is also a member of the pandemic scientific advisor group for Greece and the European commission. He is the President of the Infectious Diseases Society of Greece. He completed post graduate training at Harvard Medical School in the USA and he is board certified in both internal medicine and infectious diseases by the American Board of Internal Medicine. He is a member of the European CDC Advisory Forum since 2009 and an IDSA fellow; he also serves as a board member of the ESCMID Study Group for Respiratory viruses. He has published more than 300 peer-reviewed papers.

Pedro Póvoa, MD, PhD is associate professor of medicine at the Nova Medical School, New University of Lisbon and Coordinator of the Polyvalent Intensive Care Unit, Hospital de São Francisco Xavier, CHLO in Lisbon, Portugal. Prof. Póvoa is Associate Editor of Revista Brasileira de Terapia Intensiva and is a member of the editorial board of PLoS ONE and Hospital Practice and a reviewer for 27 medical journals. He is an active member of the Portuguese Society of Internal Medicine, Portuguese Society of Intensive Care, Associação de Medicina Intensiva Brasileira and the European Society of Intensive Care Medicine.

Liesbet De Bus is an internist-intensivist working at the surgical ICU of the Ghent University Hospital in Belgium. She has a particular interest in antimicrobial stewardship and obtained her PhD in 2018 with a thesis entitled “Use of a computer-assisted registration program to investigate antibiotic prescription and resistance in the ICU”.
She acted as co-principal investigator of the DIANA study, an ESICM-endorsed international, observational cohort study, investigating antimicrobial prescription and de-escalation in the critically ill.

Jeroen Schouten is an internist and intensivist at Radboudumc in Nijmegen and is a senior researcher at the Scientific Center for Quality of Healthcare (IQ healthcare). He earned a PhD in Infectious Diseases and Implementation Science and has been involved in qualitative research with a focus on antimicrobial stewardship ever since. As senior researcher, he has performed numerous studies on understanding and improving hospital antimicrobial use. He is experienced in qualitative and quantitative research methods and has been involved in many (inter)national initiatives to improve antibiotic prescribing (e.g. SWAB, ECCMID, ECDC, WHO). He is co-promotor of 6 PhD students. He is currently chair at ESGAP (ESCMID Study Group of Antimicrobial Stewardship).

Hafiz Abdul-Aziz is currently a research fellow at the Centre for Research Excellence for Redefining Antimicrobial Use to Reduce Resistance (CRE REDUCE) at the University of Queensland, Australia. Hafiz is a clinical pharmacist with a strong interest in clinical research, particularly those involving multi-centre and multi-national collaborations. His main research theme is primarily centred on finding novel solutions to optimise and personalise antimicrobial dosing in special patient populations, particularly in critically ill patients in the intensive care unit (ICU). Hafiz also believes that precision-based antibiotic dosing in the ICU can be achieved by integrating the use of dosing software and therapeutic drug monitoring into daily clinical practice. Hafiz has extensive experience in designing and conducting multi-centre/multi-national clinical pharmacokinetic studies in ICUs across Australia, Belgium, France, Indonesia, Malaysia, New Zealand, South Korea and Switzerland.

Antoine Roquilly is a professor of the University of Nantes (France) with a dual appointment in the Intensive Care Unit of the University Hospital of Nates and the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Medicine of Nantes (France). Antoine obtained his PhD from the University of Nantes in 2013. Subsequently, he trained at Melbourne University in Prof. Villadangos' Lab (Victoria Australia). He is now leading his laboratory and develop translational research in immunology from mice model to randomised clinical trials in critically ill patients. Antoine has received funding from the European Research Council as coordinator of a Horizon H2020 for the development of immunotherapies for hospital-acquired pneumonia, from the French Ministry of Health, for the region Pays de la Loire and is a Chief Investigator in one NHMRC grant.

Evangelos Terpos is a professor of haematology and Director of Stem Cell Transplantation Unit in the Department of Clinical Therapeutics of the National & Kapodistrian University of Athens, School of Medicine, Athens, Greece. His main research interest is the biology of plasma cell dyscrasias and especially the biology of bone disease in multiple myeloma. Dr Terpos has studied the role of modern imaging for myeloma, and he is also interested in the role of minimal residual disease (MRD) in plasma cell neoplasms. During COVID-19 pandemic, Dr Terpos evaluates the kinetics of humoral immunity after COVID-19 and after immunization against SARS-CoV-2 in healthy and cancer patients.

Andrew Conway Morris is an MRC clinician scientist at the University of Cambridge and consultant in Intensive Care Medicine at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, UK. His research focuses on secondary infection, particularly pneumonia, and the immune failure of critical illness. He has developed a number of diagnostics for nosocomial infection, including the host response test recently evaluated in the VAP-RAPID trial, and several pathogen-focussed molecular diagnostic platforms. Dr Conway Morris trained in intensive care and anaesthesia in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Cambridge, gaining a PhD in critical care immunology from the University of Edinburgh. He is the current chair of the European Society of Intensive Care Medicine’s Infection section.

John Marshall is a professor of surgery at the University of Toronto, a critical care physician at St. Michael’s Hospital, and a senior investigator in the Keenan Research Centre for Biomedical Science. He holds the Unity Health Chair in Trauma Research. His academic interests lie in the area of sepsis and life-threatening infection, trauma, and the host innate immune response to these. His laboratory studies the cellular mechanisms that prolong neutrophil survival in critical illness. He leads CIHR-funded research programmes in novel clinical trial designs and the treatment of post-resuscitation fluid overload in critically ill patients. He is the Canadian principle investigator for REMAP-CAP, a global platform trial of treatments for COVID-19.