GenPath Africa at the Grand Challenges Annual Meeting 2023
Together with initiatives that have been supported by BMGF over the past few years already, six brand new EDCTP3-funded projects – including GenPath Africa – will form a Genomic Epidemiology Network that connects public health institutes and leading academic centers in Africa to strengthen genomics capacity and make an impact on public health on the continent and beyond. The Grand Challenges Annual Meeting (GCAM) 2023 brought the six projects together for a first joint network meeting and provided the perfect platform to present the network, its members and aims in the session on the evolving role of pathogens genomics in public health surveillance to the wider scientific community on the meeting opening day.
A first joint network meeting was organized by EDCTP and BMGF as a side meeting on the first day of GCAM on 08 October 2023. The event provided an opportunity to meet each other in person, discuss practical questions around network setup and the cross-project Working Groups that will be created to share best practice and streamline efforts throughout the network.
An initial set of working groups will include a “Technical” and a “Training” Working Group, a Working Group on “Data Standards and Data Integration Platform Design & Implementation”, one to develop “Communities of Practice”, and a Working Group “Communication and Policy Translation”, with others potentially to be added later. Once the full contractual framework has been created, these working groups will pick up their coordination activities from Q1 2024.
The following day featured a special Session on the evolving role of pathogens genomics in public health surveillance as part of the main programme - including a highlight presentation of our ‘very own’ project GenPath Africa.
Following an introduction to the joint funding from Global Health EDCTP3 and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in this field by Elmar Nimmesgern, interim director of EDCTP3, GenPath Africa and its aims were presented by Nalia Ismael from INS Mozambique next to the two other cluster projects ODIN (presented by Vito Baraka from the Nigerian National Institute for Medical Research) and PANGenS (Dorothy Yeboah-Manu from the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research at the University of Ghana). Alan Christoffels from the University of the Western Cape and coordinator of NGS4Public Health reflected on opportunities for Africa PGI to support and work with the EDCTP3 projects, and the session was rounded off by a podium discussion on the vast potential of the new collaboration scheme.
The GenPath Africa consortium looks forward to working with all new partners in this exciting initiative!
