Meeting with the Sanofi-Espoir Foundation

We had the pleasure to meet with the Foundation Managing Director and the Partnership Program Senior Manager to present our initiative and the projects we support.

Founded on October 2, 2010, by Sanofi-Aventis Group, the Sanofi Espoir Corporate Foundation is tasked with supporting actions of general interest in the healthcare field on an international scale.

The Foundation's mission is to contribute to reducing health inequalities, particularly among the most needy, by focusing on key issues in prevention, training and access to care.

Talking about health and development with them made us realize how important it is to work on the project construction to come up with strong partnerships between the technology implementation and the local network to be set up around the targeted population.

Sanofi-Espoir Foundation could thus support projects aiming at improving access to healthcare and involving community healthcare people. These projects actually need to follow strict criteria to be considered: see their Guidelines to select projects. Projects involving vaccines or medicines will be be  considered by Sanofi Coporate or Sanofi-Pasteur.

As far as our HTech4Dev Initiative is concerned, two projects might fit in the Foundation scope:

• Cameroon: Anemia and Calcemia monitoring and treatment for adult women in Douala area.

• Senegal: Medical Record System

To allow these projects to meet the Foundation criteria, for each we have established a multi-disciplinary steering committee with 2 clear tasks:
-       helping to identify the best relevant technology;
-       helping to present a solid structure with an active local healthcare network aiming at  facilitating the social acceptance of the new devices.

Focus on Senegal

Prof. Mbayang Ndiaye Niang is setting up a project in Senegal as part of the Health Ministry Telemedicine Office objectives, one of the projects HTech4Dev decided to support. Their goal is to implement an e-health system in Senegal which should allow a broade and better access to health. One aspect of this ambitious project is the setting up of an electronic medical records system for patients and doctors in order to cope with the accessibility issues and the frequent people displacements in the country. It is also important to link telemedicine (teleconsulation, teleradiology etc…) to the medical records. This appears to be a realistic solution to allow a virtual bridge between the remote districts and the hospital in big cities. As far as technology is concerned, different solution already have been considered: the specifications need to be clarified regarding the users’ needs and compliance as well as the data management.

A steering committee has been formed to build up the project and address some the main issues of the project:

• Laurent Braak, MEDES, Toulouse, France
• Philippe Gesnouin, INRIA, Aviesan
• Laurence Esterle, CNRS, Aviesan
• Guillaume Delapierre, LETI, CEA
• Alexandra Monteiro, Brazil, who recently joined the team to strengthen the telemedicine aspects of the project.

There is actually a lot of work to do to organize the different tasks, plan the different steps and bring together the various stakeholders. For now, Orange-Sonatel and AMREF are the most helpful supports to start this project. The steering committee is thus working on the different work packages of the project to prioritize them and build them as separate subprojects to be funded on their own:

• Patient ID
• Epidemiological surveillance
• Patient electronic records
• Telemedicine
• Training

We have also considered creating an official structure to lead this project to address the various pivotal issues raised by this project (ethics, data management, technological challenges…).

WAHA is driving a similar pilot study on this area in Western Africa, their experience and conclusion may be complementary to our project.

Aviesan partners meeting

We met with the Aviesan partners involved in this initiative to evaluate the progress made on the projects. We actually sent them (Gambia, Cameroon, Senegal, Gabon-Fougamou) recommendation to improve their initial project, make it more focused on technology transfer and attractive for funding.

Representatives from the Pasteur Institute, IRD and INRIA noted that the technological aspects have not been yet considered as the PIs are still in the first phase of setting up their project in a population with specific needs to analyze.

We also discussed about a potential frame for our initiative. In France, several CVTs (Thematic Valorization Consortia) are being sat up to enhance technology transfer in strategic fields. The “CVT Aviesan” will focus on health technologies, the “CVT for South” will focus on technology transfer to the South. If one of our projects fits in one of the CVTs strategy, it could then be supported by a team dedicated to technology transfer and IP issues.

Happy holidays!

As we are leaving for a few days off for the holidays, we wish you all a Merry Christmas and a very happy New Year, filled with joy in your lives and success for your projects!

Meeting with the NGO ‘Women and Health Alliance International’ (WAHA)

We met with Dr. Sinan Khaddaj (Secretary General) and Cheikh Mbaye (Information Technology and Web Manager) in Paris on December 15th.

‘Women and Health Alliance International (WAHA) is an international non-profit, non-governmental organisation based in France that has been launched by Her Highness Sheikha Shamsa bint Hamdan Al-Nahyan, with the over-arching goal of addressing maternal and neonatal health in disadvantaged communities throughout the world.’

We shared a lot on their experience and their vision: new technologies are actually a great opportunity to improve health in poor areas. WAHA believes that they have to evaluate the people needs first, then see how to meet them and eventually use new technologies to accelerate and improve the solutions.

Here is a typical example of what has been achieved in Senegal together with the Fistula Fondation: they have brought ambulance to the villages within a 70 km radius of district hospital to allow the sick women to be taken care of as soon as possible.

WAHA also has projects in the field of telehealth (telediagnostic, electronic medical records) and in the implementation of new devices (e.g. they are currently looking for reliable and fast technologies to determine blood antigens when emergency transfusion is needed).

For all these reasons, WAHA and HTech4Dev will find opportunities to set up projects together in these areas. 

Feed-back on e-training projects

We received two projects aiming at developing e-training in Africa.

In Gabon, Dr. Akim Adegnika and his team in Lambaréné wanted to implement e-courses for students and medical staff. The major task of the project was to define the field and the content of the courses to then, enroll people to study online and eventually take secured tests.

As a part of the AMANET network, Dr. Aceme Nyika worked with Dr. Wen Kilama on ethics committees training about new technologies. This project addresses a capital issue not only in the developing world but also in emerging economies and even in some industrialized countries: how to evaluate, control and promote new technologies in the field of health.

These two projects do not rely on tech transfer this is why they cannot be funded through our initiative. However we believe that they are dealing with interesting topics and deserve support: we agreed to help them designing and setting up their courses.

Meeting with the European Space Agency (ESA)

 

We were introduced to ESA by Victor Demaria-Pesce, Head of Institutionnal Relations at Inserm (member of Aviesan). We had then the pleasure to meet representatives of the EU Relations Office of Paris. As we were describing our initiative they came up with very interesting remarks and comments on how space technologies can be involved for such projects for health and environment. 

As a matter of fact ESA already participates in different programmes described on their website.They have two main programmes in health:

• Integrated Application Promotion (IAP) such a SAHEL
• Tech Transfer Programme (TTP)

They could help us with their technology in many various projects:

• Meningitis: weather forecast by satellite to link meningitis epidemy to hygrometry and dry winds allowing real-time surveillance and population warning
• Diagnostic: data teletransmission and hygiene guidelines sharing
• Drug monitoring: software to secure and analyse data, extension to epidemiology
• Telemedicine: project SAHEL in Senegal

We do hope that we can build strong enough projects to meet their expectation and get their support! This could be a great step forward and good to insure the projects' sustainability.

Meeting with the Thai National Innovation Agency (NIA)

We were pleased to welcome in Aviesan’s premises in Paris on November 23^rd a Thai delegation led by the Director of the Thai National Innovation Agency.

They travelled to Germany to attend the Medika Symposium and came to Paris to get an overview of the French opportunities in terms of collaboration and technology transfer.

After a presentation of the Inserm (member of Aviesan) policy on international cooperation, 2 institutes were described: the Institute for Circulation, Metabolism and Nutrition and the Institute for Health Technologies with the HTech4Dev Initiative we are working on.

The NIA sounded very interested in this initiative as they are a funding agency specialized in technology transfer. They are aware of the needs in surrounding countries such as Cambodia, Viet Nam or Lao and would agree to contact Thai technology providers to get them involved in HTech4Dev.

Working with this Thai Agency would be a very exciting. This would be a major step forward as we intend to extend our initiative towards Asia and then develop transcontinental partnership between Asia, Africa and South America!

Thank you for coming!

We were pleased to welcome the 6 PIs of the submitted projects and an international panel of experts with various competencies, in Aviesan premises in Paris! We had a very fruitful meeting and interesting discussions about healthcare in these African countries, concrete needs in terms of accessibility, diagnostic or training, and how technology transfer may address these issues, all participants keeping in mind that our final goal is to improving the living condition of people having no access to the most basic healthcare.

The next step is now to work on these proposals to make them fit to our objectives. They mostly need to be refocused on how to implement the technology successfully (comparison to other technologies already available, safety, processing of personal data, costs, sustainability…).

Pictures of these two days are available online:

Audition of the proposals

We are pleased to welcome the 6 projects principal investigators in Paris on November 14^th and 15^th to have them present their projects to our Advisory Board and start building partnerships with the technology providers!

Here is a glimpse of our program for these 2 days:

Session 1 – E-training
Gabon “Development of medical research e-training program at the Medical Research Unit, Lambaréné”	Dr. Akim ADEGNIKA
Tanzania “e-traning of researchers and ethics committees”	Prof. Wen KILAMA
Session 2 – Diagnostic
Cameroon “Biological diagnostic of blood disorders and infectious diseases through nanoparticles in 2 rural districts of the Cameroon coast: Yabassi and Dibombari.”	Prof. Dieudonné ADIOGO
Gambia “Next generation molecular diagnostics technologies for Meningitis”	Dr. Martin ANTONIO
Session 3 – Telemedicine
Gabon “A pharmacovigilance system based on mobile phone data collection in a rural area of Gabon.”	Dr. Pierre-Blaise MATSIEGUI
Senegal “An e-health care system prototype implementation in Ziguinchor and Diourbel districts”	Dr Mbayang NDIAYE NIANG
Final discussion General discussion on the projects Future of the initiative Forum 2012 in Cape Town