As the International AIDS Conference opened in Durban, South Africa, today, two of the most important institutions biomedical research in the nation announced they will marry and combine resources to attack the coepidemic rage of tuberculosis (TB) and HIV in the region.
The new health research institute in Africa supported by the Wellcome Trust in deep UK pocketed and just as flush American Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), plans to link basic research to studies level of the population and clinical trials. "This is something very strong," says Bruce Walker, an immunologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston who is an HHMI investigator.
Many fundamental questions remain about why HIV spreads so fiercely South Africa, which has more people infected with the AIDS virus than any other country in the world. South Africa also has enormous burden of TB caused by mycobacteria that develops in immune system HIV compromises and badly needs both better diagnostics to detect cases and more effective treatments to fight against widespread multiresistant tuberculosis strains. the African health research Institute promises to tackle these problems overlap-which are both at their worst in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, where the institute resides-with a unique combination of biological samples and high core strength biological, such as blood or tissue lungs, tens of thousands of people who have carefully documented health history. "We have obtained significant funding and significant expertise and it really has a huge potential," says clinical virologist Deenan Pillay, who will head the new institute. "There is no such thing as far as I can see everywhere."
Deenan Pillay will lead the new health research Institute in Africa.
B. Gilbert / Wellcome Trust
the creation of the African Institute for health research also provides a solid home for two institutions that each have faced an uncertain future. one of the fusion partners is KwaZulu-Natal research Institute for TB-HIV (K-RITH), which HHMI established in 08 at the suggestion of Walker. the idea was to create a strong basic research institution in the heart of the TB / HIV coepidemic bring world-class researchers and to train a new generation of African scientists. HHMI spent $ 40 million building a center of biomedical state-of-the-art, including a biosafety level 3 laboratory that can handle dangerous pathogens such as drug-resistant TB and HIV. "In terms of equipment, I do not think there is place that is close in sub-Saharan Africa," says Walker.
But K-RITH encountered difficulties shortly after that it opened in 2012. its first director, William Bishai, an investigator from tuberculosis of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, eventually resigned a year later after HHMI, which emphasizes " basic research, "told him not to continue clinical trials. HHMI fears that it turns its mission and could also make it vulnerable philanthropy prosecution says development geneticist Dennis McKearin, an HHMI administrator in Durban that led K-RITH after Bishai left.
Several other familiar with the episode said Science Insider, and Bishai confirms that HHMI also had concerns he improperly used its funds to pursue Related clinical projects. Bishai insists he did nothing wrong and is "very proud" of how he led K-RITH. "Why put $ 100 million to study TB and HIV and put his right hand in a sling and prevent it from reaching out to patients?" He asks.
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Barry Bloom, a researcher of tuberculosis at Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health in Boston , who led the search committee that chose Bishai for work, said HHMI has no policy on clinical research when K-RITH open, but it was clear to him that philanthropy blanched at the idea from the start. "Howard Hughes said they would not have anything to do with patients," says Bloom. "What the bill does not understand is that they were serious. I told him 100 times. He was a bull in a china shop. "
" When Bill left he had a huge negative on K-RITH game, "notes Kristina Wallengren, an epidemiologist and molecular biologist who was clinical advisor at the institute, but formally linked to Johns Hopkins . "It was extremely damaging for scientists." (Wallengren now runs a nonprofit Durban, tuberculosis and HIV Network survey, which stages of clinical trials.)
The other partner this new union, the African Centre for population health, embraces clinical research, but also experienced upheavals. Prepared by the Wellcome Trust in 1996 to Somkhele, about 235 kilometers north of Durban, he emphasized on observational studies that track the spread of HIV through entire communities, creating elegant spatial epidemiological maps. All in all, the institute says it has "detailed demographic data" on more than 100,000 people. He also conducted clinical studies of mother to child transmission of HIV and the impact of antiretroviral therapy on the prevention of AIDS.
But in 2013, the Wellcome Trust brought Pillay, a clinical virologist at University College London, who heads the center, a leadership change that marked the desire to conduct more research that directly contributed to the local community. "One of the reasons why I became director of the Africa Centre in 2013 was the wish of the Wellcome Trust as the main funder to see a very different scientific program," said Pillay. "There has been increasing pressure and need for the African Center not only to observe the epidemic, but to do something about it. How long can you produce bloody cards?"
Pillay said Bloom effectively saved the Africa Centre. "The sense that I'm Deenan and others is that it did not work, Wellcome would have closed the place down," he said. Bloom, a former HHMI investigator who, for a time chaired the scientific Council for K-RITH, is optimistic Pillay will also be successful in his new challenge. "Deenan has the insight and enthusiasm to bring together basic research and clinical studies."
the Wellcome Trust, which unlike HHMI, strongly supports clinical trials, promised the new institution of $ 50 million over the next 5 years renewable. HHMI grant, for its part, plans to give a total of $ 80 million at the African Institute of health research (in addition to construction) by 2018, after which he plans to reduce his contribution, said McKearin.
This is the first time that the two organizations collaborated on a World health institution. "Bringing HHMI and Wellcome Trust in the financing of this unified institution is a great match," said McKearin. "It would be hard to imagine a better result."
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