Cambridge helps strengthen health research in Africa

Africa is home to 11 per cent of the world's population and the focus of many research questions, from neglected tropical diseases to the continuing burden of HIV, tuberculosis and malaria, and new issues arising from the pace (or lack) of development in some countries. Yet the continent accounts for just 0.3 per cent of the world's research output. The Wellcome Trust’s new African Institutions Initiative aims to plug this gap and safeguard the continent’s scientific future.
Cambridge will be involved with two of the programmes which are part of the initiative – ‘Training Health Researchers into Vocational Excellence in East Africa’ (THRiVE) and the Institute for Infectious Diseases of Poverty (IIDP).

The first programme, THRiVE’ ‘Training Health Researchers into Vocational Excellence in East Africa’, is led by Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, with partners elsewhere in Uganda as well as in Tanzania, Rwanda and Kenya.

THRiVE will match outstanding young researchers with exciting projects over a wide range of disciplines and support them with committed teams of scientific mentors. Over time it is hoped that the programme, which has been awarded £5.2 million by the Trust, will help to lay the foundations for a self-sustaining research community in East Africa, with the critical mass to address African health priorities.

Cambridge, alongside its partner UK institution – the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) – will provide training, mentorship and co-supervision for PhD and post-doctoral researchers in a number of African institutions. Participants will spend a year of their four-year fellowships in the UK, and African and British co-supervisors will make regular trips between partner institutions to provide support.

THRiVE will harness the expertise and enthusiasm of researchers across Cambridge, including the Sanger Genome Institute, working not only in biomedical fields but also in health-related areas across the physical, mathematical, engineering and social sciences.

The Cambridge Programme Director Professor David Dunne, from the Department of Pathology, said: “The UK partners provide THRiVE with a powerful combination of Cambridge’s multi-faculty scientific leadership in cutting-edge technologies and LSHTM’s experienced support for African health research training.

“In addition to research capacity building in African universities, THRiVE will allow Cambridge researchers to form new academic and research links in Africa and be an important step in the development of Cambridge’s long-term engagement in collaborative research, capacity strengthening, and training with African Universities.”

The second programme focuses on bringing together several institutions in four African countries to form a single virtual network, The Institute for Infectious Diseases of Poverty (IIDP), with the capacity to carry out high quality and policy relevant interdisciplinary research. Dr Sara Melville, based at Hughes Hall, is the UK coordinator of IIDP and a consultant to the Special Programme in Tropical Disease Research in Geneva.

IIDP is based in West Africa and led by The School of Public Health in Accra in association with the Ghana Health Service. With a similar focus on staff, post-doctoral and PhD training, this virtual institute aims to develop courses accredited across the participating institutions, bringing together researchers from the social sciences, public health, epidemiology and laboratory sciences. In contrast to THRiVE, the IIDP consortium will create an International Academy of Experts, drawing on the global network of scientists who collaborate with World Health Organisation programmes to act as mentors, supervisors and collaborators. There will be particular encouragement for the West African diaspora to bring their skills home.

Dr Melville said: “While the IIDP network aims to bring scientific expertise from all over the globe to help build a centre of excellence for research on infectious diseases in West Africa, I am very excited by the commitment shown in Cambridge to research capacity strengthening in Africa. I hope our networks can work closely together and that Cambridge scientists will consider collaboration with IIDP to be an exciting prospect also.”

These two consortia will give Cambridge scientists the opportunity to develop links with a wide range of African institutions and it is hoped that cooperation between THRiVE and IIDP will consolidate the University’s contribution to research capacity strengthening worldwide.
 

Image: Wellcome Trust fellows Jon Kitayimbwa, Annette Nakimuli, and Robert Tweyongyere, who are all being co-supervised by Cambridge researchers, with Professor David Dunne in Makerere University, Uganda.