ARVAC - Alumni course

The course is organized annually in June. Registration for 2024 is closed and will re-open in 2025. You will find the recordings of ARVAC 2024 lectures at the end of this page.

Context

ICAVT is a partnership of 35 vaccinology courses worldwide. Those trainings have a different history, background, content and audiences but they all have trained, over the years, altogether, thousands of experts in the area of vaccinology.

However, alumni from those various trainings have constantly requested to attend again the trainings they attended initially or other ones to update their knowledge as the vaccinology area is in constant evolution and changes thanks to a strong research pipeline and a rich and diverse implementation community.

Instead of allowing alumni to attend the trainings they already completed again or attend another course and therefore reduce the number of new experts trained, ICAVT members have agreed to jointly develop a single common refresher course dedicated to their alumni. This course provides annually the alumni from various background with lectures on the last updates on immunization and on new topics key for their daily activities.

Course objectives

The course aims at providing a refresher course and latest updates on immunization and vaccines to the alumni of the various existing advanced vaccinology training courses worldwide.

The alumni refresher vaccinology course will provide updates in the following key areas of vaccinology: immunology, vaccine development, clinical trials, regulatory processes, vaccine-specific issues including new vaccines, vaccination strategies and policies, programme implementation, humanitarian emergencies, social, economic, political and ethical issues, financing, and communications. It will also provide lectures on new areas of the discipline uncovered by previous courses.

READ MORE ABOUT OBJECTIVES

Who can attend?

This new course is targeting health care experts which have already been trained in one of the ICAVT vaccinology courses (Alumni). If you haven't been trained yet in vaccinology, we advise you to visit the ICAVT Vaccinology Trainings catalogue to identify courses you can apply to.

Format

The exact same online course is offered twice to allow participants for all over the world to attend (Morning + Afternoon sessions scheduled on 2 different weeks):

Each week, 3 sessions of a half-day (3-4 hours) is offered.
Each session of 3-4 hours contains 3 to 4 lectures of 35 minutes each.
Each lecture consists of a 25-minutes lecture and a 10 minutes live discussion between the alumni and the lecturer, animated by the chair of the session (an ICAVT member)
Alumni and ICAVT partners can ask questions using the Q and A section.

Accreditation

Every year, the course programme is submitted to the European Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (EACCME®). In June 2024, it has been accredited with 5.5 credits (Event reference LEE/2024/00621 for Week 1: 4-6 June 2024 and LEE/2024/00622 for Week 2: 11-13 June 2024). The course organizer (ADVAC at the University of Geneva) checks the attendance during the course to be able to deliver the Continuing Medical Education (CME) credits adequately. Participants in the Course should be able to convert these credits through their respective professional bodies.

Scientific Committee

PROGRAMME 2024

Lecturers & Panellists 2024