UniAbuja, others secure £5m sickle cell disease research grant

The University of Abuja, along with some international institutions, has secured over £5 million in grants to strengthen the capacity of researchers to find sustainable solutions to sickle cell disease in sub-Saharan Africa.

The Director of the Centre of Excellence for Sickle Cell Research and Training at the University of Abuja, Prof. Obiageli Nnodu, disclosed this during the Patient-Centred Sickle Cell Disease Management in Sub-Saharan Africa workshop held at the institution in Abuja.

The workshop, organised in partnership with NCESRTA and the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM), has the theme, Strengthening Institutional Research Capacity and Safeguarding.

Prof Nnodu, who also heads the Centre for Sponsored Projects at the university, said the initiative aims to enhance 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 £5m (grant),” she noted.

Declaring the workshop open, the Acting Vice Chancellor of UniAbuja, Prof Patricia Lar, said the programme reflected 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 stressed that building research capacity was 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.

The Principal Investigator for PACTS, Prof Imelda Bates, described the approach as transformative because it placed 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 to address some of those through research.

“Obviously, Nigeria is the place to do this because the country has by far the biggest population in the world of those living with sickle cell disease.

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“So it’s clearly an absolute priority for the country to research sickle cell disease,” she said.

On some of the preliminary findings, Prof Bates said the project had 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 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, because the health costs are so huge for all of these children and family members.

“So, they 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 care, and that 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.

“In addition, we also found that 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 return to laboratory, wait for the test result before getting to pharmacy to get some drugs and wait around again. All of this is costing them time and money.

“So we have tried to find some solutions to address some of these problems,” she added.

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