Dr Freddy Frost is a PhD Student at the Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital, and a BALR Travel Award winner for the BTS Winter Meeting 2018. He gave an oral presentation his abstract "S71: Reductions in cystic fibrosis lung infection with long-term ivacaftor treatment: A cohort study utilising data from the UK CF Registry" on Thursday 6th December 2018 in the session "Cystic fibrosis: correctors and potentiators" and has kindly shared his experience of the BTS with us.
"Winter BTS took place in London in December 2018 and BALR kindly awarded me a travel bursary which allowed me to attend and present two pieces of work. Across the three days I attended I found the scientific and clinical presentations to be a very high quality. I found a number of sessions on sequencing technologies particularly interesting and they really highlighted to me that such techniques will likely be increasingly used in the clinical setting in the coming years. One area where they are already in use is TB treatment where data from Public Health England’s whole-genome sequencing programme was presented and its utility in predicting antimicrobial resistance was impressive.
Other highlights included the cystic fibrosis symposium which addressed topical issues such as non-tuberculous mycobacterium and lung transplant. This symposium was extremely informative to my current clinical work and also provoked research ideas for our research group.
As well as excellent presentations the poster sessions were also of a high standard. I found the moderated poster discussions on the 5th floor interesting and being able to see prominent scientists and clinicians discuss and debate topics such as lung cancer screening was a useful experience.
After checking my slides and a quick final rehearsal I presented my research projects, both of which were selected for spoken sessions. It was fun being able to share my research with people interested in the field and the questions I got asked were constructive and certainly gave me food for thought in terms of other ways of improving my work.
The combination of clinical and scientific work at BTS attracts clinicians and scientists equally and it was great catching up with colleagues from previous jobs both during the coffee breaks and after the conference for a well-earned drink. I thoroughly enjoyed my time at Winter BTS and am grateful to the BALR for supporting me."