Dr Mike Ryan, Executive Director of the WHO Health Emergencies Programme, engages in a dialogue on the importance of pathologists in outbreak response, including management of Ebola virus disease, COVID-19 and monkeypox. He will also discuss areas where further research, development and collaboration is needed.

India is diverse in culture and heritage as well as the facilities there are for diagnosing infectious diseases. Patients in the first and second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic have been administered high doses of steroids and other immunosuppressive agents. This increases immunosuppression in the patient and the propensity to suffer from secondary infections, Dr Ranganathan N Iyer presents data from Indian centres who have experience in dealing with the diagnosis and outcome analysis of secondary bacterial and fungal infections in COVID-19 patients.

Mr Richard Skone-James and Dr Jean O’Driscoll deliver an inspiring talk about the vision The Tropical Heath Education Trust (THET) has of a world where everyone has access to healthcare. They achieve this by training and educating health workers in Africa and Asia, working in partnership with organisations and volunteers from across the UK. Highlighting some of the projects they have worked on over the last year, including a collaboration with the Ghana College of Physicians and Surgeons in Ghana also supported RCPath's International Team.

Mr Russell Dacombe discusses some of the issues affecting laboratory diagnosis and surveillance of Antimicrobial Resistance in lower-middle-income countries. Focusing on how laboratories are critical to efforts to tackle global health challenges including antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Without accurate and timely data from laboratories the scale of AMR within populations is impossible to quantify. However basic bacteriology has been neglected in many LMIC settings owing to a focus on other important issues such as tuberculosis, malaria and HIV.

The roundtable discussion revisits the College’s international work and projects, both past and present, that have successfully built capacity in laboratories, assisted with continued professional development and improved quality assurance systems. This includes prior to the establishment of the College’s International team. Looking to the future, College fellows who have made a significant contribution to the international activities of the College will also consider how the College and the global pathology community will need to evolve to meet the ever-changing needs.

This talk discusses the findings of The Lancet Commission on Diagnostics. This major work of a global multidisciplinary team of twenty-five commissioners from sixteen countries were commissioned to examine the shared challenges of pathology and laboratory medicine (PALM) and digital imaging (DI) services.

Starting at the title of this talk Dr Tbakhi, gets us in deep in thought, about how ways of working and the environment in which a healthcare professional will operate in years to come is likely to be.

Professor Nasir Rajpoot Professor of Computational Pathology at the Computer Science department of the University of Warwick presents the work of his PHD students, which is an intriguing exploration, into how with an increasing number of NHS pathology labs being digitised in the UK, there is an explosion in the amount of pathology image data with linked clinical outcomes.

The roundtable panel discuss the need to leverage the power of digital pathology to establish practical solutions that will positively impact global health for everyone.

Associate Professor Clare Verrill and guest Dr Yuchun Ding, founder of X-WOW, discuss how X-WOW began its mission, the importance of education and raising public awareness about the essential role of pathology in healthcare services.

Professor Jo Martin shows how technology will be used to enhance learning and how the platform aims to incorporate the ability to host and view whole slide imaging (WSI) over the world wide web (virtual microscopy) to enable pathology tissue samples to be annotated and viewed as part of learning sets, mapped to the relevant curricula of the College, and hosted and maintained within the system.

Hear about how for all laboratories, priority testing necessarily focused on people who were symptomatic, as well as part of contact-tracing programs, and at-risk patients and health and social care staff, healthcare workers and residential care providers. A small number of operators, found themselves in ‘exotic’ projects, such as the design of a hygiene and diagnostics concept for the German Bundesliga, which ultimately became the first professional sports league in the Western world to resume regular matches (closely followed by the Premier League).

This presentation, reviews knowledge of serology testing for both SARS CoV-2 and MERS-CoV, and classes of antigen and antibody used in serology assays in 2020. It examines the role of serology in pandemics of coronavirus origin and asks whether serology has a part to play in ‘immunity passports’. Among other questions, it is also asked how long do antibodies to betacoronaviruses usually last and is there a role for rapid antibody testing in the clinical setting?

This talk delivered by Professor Tahir Pillay, discusses one approach that was taken in South Africa in 2020 to use nanobodies to develop both biosensors and rapid lateral flow immunoassays. Single domain antibodies (“nanobodies”), which have the potential to revolutionise diagnostic testing. Their size, stability and robustness make them ideal for gene manipulation and alteration in the laboratory, and production costs are low.

Dr Pikka Jokelainen and Dr Martha Betson discuss ‘TOXOSOURCES – Toxoplasma gondii sources quantified’ a 2.5-year (2020–2022) Joint Research Project of the One Health European Joint Programme (One Health EJP), with a focus on T. gondii at the interface between humans, animals, food and the environment. The TOXOSOURCES Consortium, comprising 20 One Health EJP partners across Europe and several external partners.

The roundtable panel discuss the importance of international information exchange – especially in a pandemic – and how screening, diagnosis, treatment selection, and health monitoring differ between regions. Against the setting of COVID-19, it is more important than ever not to place boundaries on our ability to learn from one another.