Rhema Association Management is the virtual website management office of KSHV 2020. She is the Website Manager for web site development, and she will coordinate with the Tanzania hosts and the meeting organizers in negotiating all the meeting’s logistics.

POSTPONED:
The 23rd conference will be postponed to June of 2021 for travel concerns related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

June 21 – 24, 2021 | Dar es Salaam, Tanzania | Followed by a dedicated networking and training workshop on June 25th, to engage Africa and the next generation of researchers
The  23rd International Conference on Kaposi’s Sarcoma Herpesvirus (KSHV) and Related Agents is now planned for June 21 – June 24, 2021 at Hotel White Sands Resort & Conference Centre, located 15 miles (25 km) north of Dar es Salaam city center, on a private 1 km stretch of beach, Jangwani Beach, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The conference will be followed by a dedicated networking and training workshop on Friday, June 26th to engage Africa and the next generation of researchers.

Marking the beginning of a new quarter century since the discovery of this cancer virus, KSHV 2020 will be the first in this conference series to be held in Africa, where the majority of HIV infections take place and where KS is more common than prostate cancer is in the US. The organizing committee and the participants felt that this should mark a new era in inclusiveness and global outreach such that the numerous groundbreaking discoveries about the virus can be more quickly translated to preventing the disease and treating the affected patients, for the international community of researchers to engage African researchers, clinicians and trainees, to foster collaborations in basic, translational and clinical research.

This 23rd iteration of the International KSHV Conference series will continue to serve as the premier forum for the exchange of new developments in the field of the Kaposi’s sarcoma virus (KSHV), which is the etiological agent of the AIDS defining malignancy, Kaposi’s sarcoma (KS). Researchers in the KSHV field have held 22 previous annual conferences, typically attended by 100-184 participants.

The KSHV 2020 international organizing committee (IOC) and scientific advisory committee (SAC) will formulate an innovative and thematic format for the meeting to be hosted in Dar es Salaam from June 22^nd – June 25th of 2020, followed by a dedicated networking and training workshop on Friday, June 26th to engage Africa and the next generation of researchers. Our objective is to bring together a diverse audience of researchers and clinicians, especially those on the ground in Africa who are encountering HIV-associated diseases daily, to facilitate the conduct of both translational and basic research on KSHV and KS, to foster new collaborations, and to explore novel therapeutic strategies for treating patients with ailments associated with KSHV in diverse populations and geographies.

This yearly meeting is key to enhance interactions among scientists in the field and promote interdisciplinary communication and collaborations among researchers with expertise that span molecular virus biology, innate and adaptive immunobiology, animal models of pathogenesis, pathology, epidemiology and therapeutic strategies. Thus, this meeting facilitates cross-fertilization of ideas, techniques, and reagents.