Framework to Address Drug Resistant Infections and Global Health

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The objective of this training program is to establish a training program for US PhD and MD postdoctoral fellows to gain experience in global health research, focused on drug-resistant infections. The program will be comprised of a consortium of researchers at UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco, and existing collaborating institutions in Brazil, India, and South Africa. These countries represent emerging economy nations where the problem of drug resistant infections has become a major public and clinical health concern. We will divide the training program into two components-1) one designed to introduce and train postdoctoral fellows in disciplines that are not traditionally represented in global health (chemistry, bioengineering, bioinformatics, genomics, mathematics), and 2) one designed to cross-train postdoctoral fellows in medicine and public health doing global health work with those fellows in the social sciences and economics also doing global health work. Six program areas will include training of 1) chemistry and bioengineering postdoctoral fellows to develop and validate molecular detection systems adapted to detect drug-resistant pathogens on site; 2) bioinformatics and genomics postdoctoral fellows to create a public-domain electronic database to be shared by other researchers to study determinants of drug- resistance; 3) fellows who do biostatistics and modeling research to characterize and predict the dynamic global and regional spread of drug-resistant infections; 4) fellows in microbiology, immunology, and chemistry doing pathogenesis research to initiate new studies to examine mechanisms of drug resistance and identify new drug targets to circumvent drug resistance mechanisms of M. tuberculosis; 5) infectious disease public health and clinical research fellows and social and behavioral science fellows at field sites abroad to characterize the biologic, epidemiologic, clinical, social, and behavioral determinants of drug resistance; 6) public health, clinical, social science, and economics research fellows to work together to characterize the genetic determinants of drug-resistance, their global distribution, the impact of human economic activities on the spread, and its economic impact on health. The long term goal of these programs is to produce a new generation of leaders in global health research. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: This interdisciplinary research and training initiative will address the global challenge of antibiotic resistance by recruiting non-traditional disciplines (i.e. engineering, chemistry, city planning, and environmental science) into infectious disease research. The initiative will focus on the transmission dynamics of drug resistance in the U.S. and in emerging economies like Brazil, India and South Africa.