UniAbuja Secure £5m Grant to Advance Sickle Cell Research

The Yakubu Gowon University, formerly known as the University of Abuja, alongside several international institutions, has secured over £5 million to advance sickle cell research across sub-Saharan Africa.

The Director of the Centre of Excellence for Sickle Cell Research and Training at the institution, Prof. Obiageli Nnodu, made this known during the Patient-centred Sickle Cell Disease Management in Sub-Saharan Africa workshop held at the institution on Tuesday.

The workshop, which was organised by CESTRA in collaboration with PACTS Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, has the theme as ‘Strengthening Institutional Research Capacity and Safeguarding.’

Prof. Nnodu, who also heads the Centre for Sponsored Projects at the university, said the initiative is aimed at enhancing the ability of African institutions to undertake world-class sickle cell research through capacity development.

“Research is a very important vehicle for national development and it is good for African institutions to have the capacity to do research strengthening through training and then through putting the right infrastructure in place, not only to win grants, but to monitor, manage and carry out the research projects and to be able to report and implement findings from research projects into the society, into policy.

“So, this capacity strengthening workshop is a very important one in our university because over the past four years, we have had significant increases in the number of research grants that we are getting, but we also have what I would tend to say is a population, a faculty that needs to have their capacity built to participate in funded research,” she explained.

Prof. Nnodu, who serves as Co-Principal Investigator on PACTS, added that the project involves institutions in Ghana, Zambia, the United States, and the United Kingdom.

“It’s research that we are carrying out with the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, Kwame Nkrumah University of Health and Allied Science and Technology, and the University of Zambia Teaching Hospital. So, it’s over 5 million pounds (grant),” she noted.

Declaring the workshop open, Acting Vice Chancellor of UniAbuja, Prof. Patricia Lar, said the programme reflects the institution’s commitment to tackling the burden of sickle cell disease.

“This workshop represents a key moment in our shared commitment to advancing research excellence.

“Particularly in the fight against sickle cell disease, which is a public health challenge, not only in Nigeria, but in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa,” the Acting VC, represented by her Senior Special Assistant on Academic Matters, Prof. Rhoda Mundi, stated.

She emphasised that building research capacity is both a strategic necessity and a responsibility for institutions seeking to create lasting solutions.

“So, I hope that this is an opportunity to share knowledge, to learn from one another, and to form a collective result to improve health outcomes, not just in Nigeria, but throughout, and to improve the quality of the research we have,” she added.

Prof. Imelda Bates, Principal Investigator for PACTS, described the approach as transformative because it places patients at the centre of the research.

“It is patient-centred sickle cell disease management in Sub-Saharan Africa which is a totally new way of doing research because it puts the patients at the centre. So, we talk to them about their problems and then we try and address some of those through research.

“Obviously Nigeria is the place to do this because Nigeria has by far the biggest population in the world of those living with sickle cell disease. So, it’s clearly an absolute priority for the country to do research on sickle cell disease.

“So, the project is led by myself and Professor Nnodu jointly and it also got partners in Kumasi in Ghana and Lusaka in Zambia as well as University in the US and Imperial College in London.

“And it’s working with the centre here, which serves as a hub for implementation research and also a lot of training on building research capacity.

“So, our project is really helping the patients to access better care in the hospitals, and so we are working with the communities, we are working with the health facilities where they go,” she said.

On some of the preliminary findings, Bates said the project has identified several barriers facing affected families.

“Some of the key findings are that these families are finding it very hard to afford healthy food and to make any lifestyle changes that would really benefit the patients and we know that a lot of the families with sickle cell disease have many children affected and they often tend to be the poorest families because the health costs are so huge for all of these children and family members.

“So, they do struggle to afford transport to come to clinics, to buy food, to go to school, and so we want to try and understand some solutions to some of these issues. We also know that many of these patients are turning initially to herbal remedies instead of going to the hospital for hospital care, and that for some of them is causing prolonged illness because they’re not necessarily getting the correct treatment, and they can’t be followed up.

“Many of them need, for example, blood transfusions, which are just not going to be available through traditional mechanisms.

“And the travel distances, transportation costs I’ve mentioned, but in addition we also found one of the real challenges for them is that once they get to the health facility they’re sitting around for a very long time waiting to see the nurse or the doctor and then they have to go to the laboratory and they wait around again for a laboratory test and then they go to pharmacy and have to get some drugs and wait around again and all of this is costing them time and money.

“They can’t work when they’re in the clinics. The children are out of school. So we have tried to find some solutions to address some of these problems,” she added.