When Francis Collins first took the helm at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) last year, he marked global health as one of five “themes” that would receive special priority from his office. A series of grants worth a total of $130 million awarded to universities and health institutes in a dozen countries in sub-Saharan Africa announced today shows the NIH director is putting his money where his mouth is – at least with the help of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).
The 5-year initiative funds African universities partnering with institutions in the United States. Eleven $10 million grants specifically focus on medical education and research training relating to HIV/AIDS, but smaller awards will take a broader tack. The idea is to transform medical education in Africa, with the ultimate goal of training more health care workers and thereby boosting primary care.
The aim of the program, Collins told Nature in an interview in July, is “to build research capacity in African institutions to enable them to begin to play a larger role in studying their own health needs, in providing solutions, because I think the era of the developed world swooping in, doing the research, saying ‘here’s what you should do’ and leaving is not the era we want anymore.”
According to the NIH, $105 million of the funding for the program will come from PEPFAR. The other $25 million will come from the NIH.
The African universities receiving awards were already engaged in projects receiving PEPFAR funding. Emilia Virginia Noormahomed, a parasitologist at the Universidade de Eduardo Mondlane in Mozambique, the oldest of the country’s three medical schools, has been involved in running an exchange training program with the University of California, San Diego, for hospital residents at both institutions for the past four years.
“This was a great opportunity to write a grant with different aims in order to really improve our medical education,” says Noormahomed. The award she will oversee intends to strengthen the medical school faculty by recruiting and mentoring young trainee physicians, enhance research capacity by modernizing the medical school technology, and put in place a bioinformatics infrastructure that will allow faculty members to communicate more easily and to access journals and books online. The benefits will also trickle out to the two newer medical schools, she says.
The PEPFAR/NIH initiative also funds a coordinating center, which will help institutions maximize their programs’ effects by facilitating the sharing of data and outcomes and by establishing resources like clinical registries.
“We were impressed by the magnitude of this program,” says Phyllis Kanki, an infectious disease researcher at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts. She and her colleagues are partnering with grant recipient David Olaleye, a virologist at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria, to revamp curricula for medical education programs and create more opportunities and support for research there.
“There’s a real need to have people who are well-trained,” she says. “I think it’s very supportive of the roll-out of both prevention and treatment programs.”
Image: Dominic Chavez
Caption: The Medical Education Partnership in Nigeria will support the development of a “in-service” training program. The care and treatment of HIV and related diseases particularly in pediatric patients has been a major emphasis of the existing Harvard and APIN PEPFAR treatment programs.