Capacity building for a Centre of Design, Innovation and Translational Excellence (CITE) for clinical trials of healthcare technologies in SS Africa
Medical Research Council
Makerere University
Great strides have been taken to reduce global maternal and neonatal mortality. However, due to numerous factors such as limited access to resources including funding, healthcare providers among others, means that maternal and neonatal mortality have remained stubbornly high in sub-Saharan Africa. Advances in technological innovations, including contextually appropriate devices coupled with mobile health technologies offer the opportunity to improve healthcare outcomes in maternal and neonatal health. For instance, improved and timely diagnostics, therapy and monitoring can improve outcomes for mothers with conditions such as preeclampsia, postpartum haemorrhage and pneumonia and hypothermia for neonates. In Uganda, researchers, students and innovators have developed many contextually appropriate solutions with some winning international awards. such devices include: (1) Maternal (postpartum haemorrhage (PPH) Wrap (https://challenges.openideo.com/challenge/reproductive-health/ideas/maternal-wrap-a-first-aid-postpartum-hemorrhage-belt); (2) The EPED strip: The Early Pre-Eclampsia Detection strip (https://bigideascontest.org/winners/early-preeclampsia-detection-strip/); and (3) Mama Ope a smart jacket for early diagnosis and monitoring of pneumonia in children aged between 0 and 5 years (http://mamaope.com/en/). Such great innovations have found a great challenge in translation to useful products due to limited capacity in clinical evaluation and translational expertise in the country. Our aim is to strengthen propose our proposed interdisciplinary Centre of Design, Innovation and Translational Excellence (CITE) in collaboration with University of Edinburgh. We propose to map existing knowledge about the systems and processes for clinical evaluation of locally made Investigational Medical Devices (IMD) amongst key stakeholders in Uganda and to strengthen local research capacity through training on clinical trial design.
3.5 Resources and infrastructure (prevention) / Research Grant