MRC/UVRI Medical Informatics Centre

Collating information on human health and disease, and understanding the biological processes that may cause disease can help identify ways to develop new treatments for these diseases. The use of complex statistics, computational resources and genetic information has greatly facilitated our understanding of human disease. For Africa to fully benefit from the technological advances in computing and ways to store and manage "big scientific data", we will need to ensure that African researchers have access to such resources locally. As part of an international collaboration, we aim to build a computational network and resource in Uganda, and train the next generation of African computer scientists as part of this initiative. This project will help facilitate our understanding on diseases in Africa and also provide a way to assess changes in the prevalence of these diseases, including HIV and other chronic diseases such as diabetes.

The integration of epidemiological methods-including large-scale, multi-centre studies and pooled analyses of observational and interventional studies-with genomic and computational technologies has provided new insights into the biology of a broad range of diseases, including human and pathogen genomic diversity, and their risk factors. These advances in genomics create new opportunities and challenges for researchers in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Given the marked genomic diversity among human and pathogen populations in SSA,1,2 understanding the genomic basis of these diseases and their risk factors in populations of African descent will provide: 1) additional insights into disease aetiology; 2) new opportunities for disease surveillance; and 3) potential therapeutic and public health intervention strategies. If countries in SSA are to benefit from developments in genomics and medical informatics, there is a need to strengthen capacity, training and collaboration across the region, and with northern partners, to ensure SSA researchers can play a full part. To capitalise on these technological advances and to ensure the efficient utilisation of data resources in clinical epidemiology and large scale genomics across SSA from existing and on-going research programmes, and as part of the MRC/UVRI Uganda Research Unit on AIDS, we propose to develop the MRC/UVRI Medical Informatics Centre (MIC) in Entebbe, Uganda (panel 1). The planned centre will house a computer cluster and build on established strategic collaborations with UK research centres. These UK centres will provide scientific and logistical support to develop infrastructure and computational processes, cloud computing and human research capacity, as well as supporting pan-African and north-south research partnerships (Africa-UK medical informatics consortium).

The integration of epidemiological methods-including large-scale, multi-centre studies and pooled analyses of observational and interventional studies-with genomic and computational technologies has provided new insights into the biology of a broad range of diseases, including human and pathogen genomic diversity, and their risk factors. These advances create new opportunities and challenges for researchers in SSA. If countries in SSA are to benefit from developments in genomics and medical informatics, there is a need to strengthen capacity, training and collaboration across the region, and with northern partners, to ensure SSA researchers can play a full part. The proposed MRC/UVRI Medical Informatics Centre in Entebbe will create opportunities to capitalise on these technological advances and to ensure the efficient utilisation of data resources in clinical epidemiology and large scale genomics across SSA from existing and on-going research programmes.

The data centre will allow for harmonised data storage, management and access across centres. Through establishing a centralised bioinformatics infrastructure, a broad spectrum of scientific studies will be supported. This approach will also provide a sustainable model, accessible by a broad scientific community spanning epidemiology, genomics and public, for both infectious and non-infectious diseases. We aim to enhance existing capacity through the expansion of the existing network and server system and with the addition of a full-time data manager. The research community - particularly researchers working in African centres - will benefit from this investment in training and infrastructure; thus the data centre will provide an excellent framework to develop a sustainable international research programme in SSA.

There will be multiple beneficiaries linked to this planned medical informatics centre in Uganda. These beneficiaries include: 1) the national government--the Ugandan Ministry of Health is an active supporter of the proposed initiative, and will directly benefit from the resource in the context of disease surveillance and analyses to inform public health policy; 2) regional research and educational institutes--local research institutes and universities will have access to the proposed computational resource to facilitate their research and operational programmes; 3) the next generation of African computational scientists and research leaders--as part of an integrated programme of research capacity and training linking several pan-African capacity building initiatives; and 4) the wider scientific community--with a framework for governance and data access and sharing the planned medical informatics centre will provide access to data for global initiatives to facilitate a step change in human health research.

No direct commercial exploitation is anticipated.