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

Back from South Africa!

I am just back from South Africa where I attended the 1^st Micro-Med-A workshop on ‘Microsystems Technologies for African Health’.

Here is a short glimpse of what has been exposed and discussed during these 3 days:

The talks were very diverse and addressed 3 main issues:

-       The situation in Africa, India or South-East Asia and the burden of infectious diseases

-       The technologic, social and safety requirements for Point of Care diagnostic

-       State-of-the art microfluidics

This conference was focused on African Health and mostly on infectious diseases diagnostic such as TB, HIV, Malaria or Influenza. Similar issues are faced in countries like India or Malaysia where telemedicine and microdiagnostic have already been implemented with success.  

Exciting micro devices were detailed and their potential in improving health is huge! They’re speed, safe, sensitive and low cost. They use blood, breath or saliva, are developed to be easy to use and fit in the specific context of these areas. As a matter of fact, local acceptation from people, doctors and patients is a key factor for these medical devices to be useful.

However, IP and data confidentiality issues were not raised and this is maybe why none of these devices has yet been implemented in Africa.

=> Click here to read the conference report.

This few days in South Africa also allowed us to go on an incredible game drive in Kruger Park! We got the chance to watch gorgeous animals under the beautiful light of sunset…

Projects in construction…

Even if August was very calm because of summer vacation in France, the HTech4Dev initiative is still on!

Following the pre-submission process closed in July, several countries are already building detailed projects in the field of nanotechnologies and/or telemedicine.

They have been sent an “application form” to help us define their objectives, build a team and evaluate the costs. From this document, we will next work on setting up the partnership with technology providers and then look for funding.

These projects must be focused on one axis so that we can expect short term implementation, get measurable results and present it to sponsors.

Micro-Med-A 2011

The first Micro-Med-A workshop, to be held at the Protea Hotel, Kruger Gate, Mpumalanga, South Africa, from 7-10 September 2011

The first workshop focusing on defining the challenges of microsystems based diagnostics for health, addressing such areas as HIV/Aids, malaria, TB and water monitoring.

The workshop will focus on the following themes:

• Burden of disease in Africa
• Microfluidic diagnostic technologies
• Point of care diagnostics
• Water quality monitoring

See the Preliminary Programme

In order to strengthen our network of stakeholders, Claire Nové-Josserand will attend the workshop. Outcome of her visit will be posted after her return.