Recently, Dr Assan Jaye received the welcome news that he, together with colleagues from Dakar and Bissau, won a 1.8 million Canadian dollar capacity building grant from the Global Health Research Initiative, Canada. The West African bid was one of four that won funding; the other winners were from Uganda, Kenya and South Africa. The award comes into effect in July 2010, and as Dr Jaye explains here, it will enhance MRC The Gambia’s plans to build a robust network of sub-regional partners.
Building a shared resource
‘The grant is a four-year consortium award for the development of capacity in HIV clinical trials in Africa.’ Explains Dr Jaye.

‘Working with partners from Dakar, Bissau, Denmark, Oxford, Toronto and Montreal, we plan to amalgamate our regional cohorts and resources, with Dakar as the centre.’

‘This West African Platform for HIV Intervention Research (WAPHIR) will develop partners’ biobank capabilities, expand population cohorts and pool shared resources. The partners are bringing a lot of expertise to the table: MRC has long been a hub for laboratory and other training in the sub-region; the Bacteriology and Virology groups at Cheikh Anta Diop University (Dakar) manage the large sex workers cohort and HIV laboratory platform; and Professor Pap Salif Sowe’s research and training centre of tropical infectious diseases in Dakar has extensive experience on clinical management of an ambulatory cohort. With the addition of the Caio cohort biobank resources and the Bissau cohort, we are poised to create an HIV network, by pooling resources and preparing the ground for vaccine trials and other research.’

‘We intend to develop each site’s biobank resources. Each will retain their own biobanks, but we’ll be amalgamating the data at one source (Dakar). Access to data will be shared, with requests being made through a steering committee and our own ethics committee.’

Capacity
‘The grant includes capacity building components in laboratory management, clinical trials management, biobank and biomedical engineering management. We need to make sure that each of the sites has the ability to contribute on an equal footing. For example, Guinea Bissau is not as advanced as Dakar in terms of research expertise and infrastructure, so this proposal will really help them to participate fully in joint regional research initiatives.’

Towards improved laboratories
‘The grant will enable us to develop certain laboratory platforms for clinical trials such as cellular immunology. We’ll also be focusing on the quality processing of samples, good laboratory practice and quality management in general. We intend to transfer some basic technologies such as HLA typing, and we’ll be working on the development of Dakar’s virology platform as the centre for this. We also intend to share our successful biobank and biomedical engineering models with Dakar.’

Training
‘The award’s staff development component includes training to master’s level in areas such as clinical trials, immunology and virology. There are also PhD and post doc opportunities.’

A timely award
‘MRC UK has endorsed the setting up of a West African research network in principle. However, it would have been a massive challenge to start off without this grant, which will do so much to develop sub-regional research capacity.

I hope that we will be able to achieve a lot in the next four years. I am very proud of this proposal and our success in winning this funding. And I’d like to end by thanking Professor Tumani Corrah for all his encouragement and support. He kept on urging me to be persistent and not to give up!’