Teacher: Jean-Christophe Thalabard

In the land of the monolingual "Translating a basic finding into a new therapy requires us to speak many languages - scientific, clinical, legal and financial. Yet most of us are hopelessly monolingual, a limitation that substantially slows translational research. Steps have been taken to address this problem, but a lot remains to be done" Nature Medicine 15, 975 (2009). To achieve this goal, in addition to original articles, the major medical journals bring regularly to their readers updates on various aspects of basic research which could potentially be translated to humans. This excursion mainly into major medical journals will help the students: i) to discover their contents, their target readership and how they are structured and ii) to summarize and present the results of both original and review articles.
The following journals will be regularly browsed to form the reading list: Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, Nature Medicine, PLoS Medicine. An initial list of articles will be posted in the corresponding section for the course in the M1 moodle web- area. It presently includes the following topics: Genetic and Molecular Epidemiology, Infectious diseases, HIV, Modelisation of the spread of infectious disease and their prevention, Systematic Review and Meta-analysis, Causality, and General Hypotheses.
For each session, 1- 2 papers will be selected and read by all the students, who are individually expected to prepare a written short critical review. A group of 2-3 students will be in charge of presenting the selected paper with an open discussion based on the questions and comments raised by the audience.