New Haven's Long Wharf Theater, in collaboration with Yale University and CURE, hosted a unique Global Health and The Arts Symposium January 22 designed to focus attention on diseases of the developing world. In a letter signed by David Scheer, President of the venture capital firm Scheer & Company, Dr. Michael Cappello, of the Yale School of Medicine, and Paul Pascatello, President and CEO of CURE, the Connecticut healthcare and bioscience communities were invited to the event, which included presentations before and during dinner, followed by a performance of Athol Fugard's new play "Coming Home" and a post-production discussion of the play with the audience. Reviews of the play have been highly positive. (See for example the Hartford Courant.) The intent, the organizers wrote, was to "utilize an artistic venue as a platform for convening world class academic and industrial stakeholders to highlight basic and translational research on HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis (TB), vector borne, and parasitic diseases." Welcoming the guests were David Scheer, Dr. Robert Alpern, Dean of the Yale School of Medicine, and Gordon Edlestein, Artistic Director of Long Wharf Theater. The keynote speaker was one of the pioneers in the field of HIV/AIDS and TB treatment, Dr. Gerald Friedland, Professor of Medicine and Director of the Yale AIDS Care Program. Yale researchers speaking included Dr. Yorgo Modis, Assistant Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry; and Dr. Erol Fikrig, Chief of the adult Infectious Diseases Section at Yale and a Howard Hughes Investigator.

Other Yale researchers speaking were Dr. Cappello, who is Professor of Pediatric Infectious Diseases and Director of the Yale World Fellows Program (hookworm and soil-transmitted helminths); Dr. Elijah Painstil, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics; and Dr. Choukri Ben Mamoun, Assistant Professor of Internal Medicine.

Also on the program were Dr. Eric Rubin, Professor of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at the Harvard School of Public Health (TB), and several speakers from bioscience industry: Dr. Allan Saul, CEO of Novartis Vaccines Institute for Global Health; Dr. Roger Pomerantz, President of TiboTec; Dr. John Houston, Vice President at Bristol-Myers Squibb; Dr. Robert Sebbag, Vice President at Sanofi-Aventis; Dr. Milind Deshpande, Chief Scientific Officer at Achillion Pharmaceuticals; and Dr. Christopher D. Earl, CEO of BIO Ventures for Global Health.

Gordon Edelstein offered a discussion of how HIV/AIDS has impacted the arts over the years. Dr. John Puziss of Yale's Office of Cooperative Research spoke about Yale's successes in translational research and commercialization of intellectual property.

The discussion following Athol Fugard's play was led by Michael Fuchs, formerly the chairman of HBO and now and independent producer.

Others on the discussion panel were Gordon Edelstein and Steven Phillips, Medical Director of ExxonMobil, who oversees the company's activities in and support of global health, and also serves as Vice Chair of the Harvard School of Public Health Unfinished Agenda in Infectious Disease Initiative; Karina Danvers, Coordinator of the CT AIDS Education and Training Center; Dr. Nancy Angoff, the Associate Dean for Student Affairs at Yale School of Medicine and Associate Professor of Internal Medicine; and Paula Vogel, PulitzerPrize-winning playwright and Chair of the Playwriting Department at the Yale School of Drama.