COVID-19 forces CROI to go virtual for second year in a row
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The Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections is being held virtually for the second year in a row because of COVID-19.
Infectious Disease News Chief Medical Editor Paul A. Volberding, MD, professor emeritus of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, said CROI organizers dodged a “massive bullet” last year by converting the meeting to a digital format just days before it began.
CROI was one of the first medical conferences to be impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. A year later, virtual meetings have become routine.
“We’ve all gotten very experienced in the past year with ‘attending’ virtual conferences and have learned that while we miss the personal contacts, these meetings can be very effective,” Volberding told Healio. “We can linger over details, rewatch sessions, see sessions we otherwise would have missed and participate given our various time zones and daily responsibilities. I’m fully expecting an exciting CROI.”
The conference, which runs from March 6 to March 10, features 4 1/2 hours of broadcast sessions each day, in addition to on-demand research. Abstracts and presentations are accessed through a virtual platform.
Workshops for investigators and trainees are available and include topics like advances in HIV molecular virology, progress toward an HIV cure, and HIV and SARS-CoV-2 immunology. Presentations explore topics such as imaging viral life cycles and disparities in health care. Oral abstracts cover topics like opportunities for optimizing drug dosing for HIV, and HIV host and cellular interactions.
was “notable” for progress in HIV prevention and treatment, which will be covered during the meeting.
“We will hear about progress in new drugs that are active despite resistance to older agents and of long-acting injectable and oral medications that we hope will find their way into our everyday armamentarium in both treatment and prevention,” he said.
Registration to the conference costs $650 and can be purchased through CROI’s website. For live coverage of the conference, visit Healio’s CROI resource center.
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CROI. Preliminary agenda for virtual CROI, March 6-10, 2021. https://www.croiconference.org/preliminary-agenda/. Accessed March 3, 2021.
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