CHANDIGARH,06.12.22-Prof Kusum Sharma, Department of Medical Microbiology PGIMER, Chandigarh won the prestigious Prof AN Chakrabarty Memorial Prize 2022 for her work in the field of Tuberculous meningitis. Her work was titled Comparative analysis of Trunat^TM MTB Plus and XPERT Ultra in diagnosing tuberculous meningitis. This award is given by Indian Society of Medical Microbiology for the best published research in the field of mycobacteriology(Tuberculosis). This was presented during the recently held National Conference of Microbiology ( Microcon 2022) at Bhubaneshwar.

Prof Kusum has been actively working in the field of extrapulmonary tuberculosis since 2007. She played an important role in establishing, and facilitating the molecular diagnosis of tuberculosis at PGI. Her group demonstrated multidrug resistance in ocular tuberculosis for the first time in the world. Then she developed LAMP and Multi-targeted LAMP to facilitate tuberculosis diagnosis in resource constrained settings. This was a major leap as this is a cheap technique and does not require very sophisticated equipment and can even be carried out in areas without good electricity connection.