eWHORM presented at the Joint Parasitology Spring Meeting 2025
The Joint Parasitology Spring Meeting 2025 took place from March 11 to 14, 2025, at the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzbur in Würzburg, Germany. This collaborative event was organized by the the German Society for Parasitology (DGP), British Society for Parasitology (BSP), and the Swiss Society for Tropical Medicine and Parasitolog (SSTMP). The conference brought together around 550 leading experts, researchers, and professionals in parasitology to exchange knowledge, present groundbreaking discoveries, and foster valuable networking opportunities.
Representatives of the eWHORM Consortium took the stage before an audience of young parasitologists and seasoned experts from around the world to introduce the eWHORM project and showcase its latest advancements.
The eWHORM presentations commenced on the morning of Tuesday, March 12, 2025, with Prof. Dr. Jaap van Hellemond from the Erasmus University Medical Center (EMC). He participated in the highly anticipated session, “Parasitology at the Beginning of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Age.” His talk introduced an innovative platform that digitizes clinical specimens using a microscopic scanner and employs AI to enhance diagnostic capabilities. This technology, one cornerstone of the eWHORM trial, aims to revolutionize virtual training and diagnostic accuracy in low-income countries.
On Wednesday, March 13, 2025, Prof. Dr. Achim Hörauf from the University Hospital Bonn (UKB) held a plenary session discussing helminth infections as a One Health issue. In his talk, he emphasized the importance of the eWHORM trial in improving health outcomes in resource-limited settings.
Adding to the discussion on treatment innovations, PD Dr. Sabine Specht from DNDi gave a compelling plenary talk in the special session “Anti-Parasitic Therapies” organized by the Paul-Ehrlich Society and chaired by the eWHORM coordinator Prof. Dr. Marc Hübner and PD Dr. Simone Häberlein. Dr. Specht presented an overview of the current drug development pipeline for filarial infections, discussing both successes and challenges in drug development for filarial diseases. Dr. Specht highlighted the urgent need for novel treatment approaches, introducing the scope, scale, and groundbreaking design of the eWHORM trial as a promising step forward addressing current gaps in treatment options.
Preclinical Advances in eWHORM Research
Beyond clinical applications, the preclinical progress of eWHORM was showcased by PhD candidate Hannah Wegner and Postdoc Dr. Frederic Risch from Prof. Marc Hübner’s group. Dr. Frederic Risch gave an additional talk in the “Anti-Parasitic Therapies” session highlighting that oxfendazole has an excellent efficacy against the infective L3 larval stage in mice, allowing shorter treatment durations and suggesting that oxfendazole cures filarial infections independent of the time of infection. Hannah Wegner presented a poster on enhancing oxfendazole treatment efficacy in mice using vaccine adjuvants, demonstrating its potential to reduce treatment duration while enhancing effectiveness.
