Awarded Grants

Vinicius de Araujo Oliveira of Fiocruz in Brazil will develop a framework for the re-use of large clinical and administrative datasets to enable comparative analysis of COVID-19 vaccine safety and effectiveness in Brazil and in Pakistan, with colleagues at Shaukat Khanum Memorial Cancer Hospital and Research Centre there, to improve pandemic responses and promote data-driven evidence generation in the Global South. Monitoring vaccinations across different settings is crucial for containing pandemics. However, comparative analysis of large health datasets in different scenarios is challenging due to concerns around safety and reproducibility and the loss of the context in which the data was collected, which can affect research results. They will adapt data science standards and tools to different local health system scenarios and run individual and joint vaccine effectiveness analyses for the two countries to assess compatibility and reproducibility of the findings. They will also build a public data visualization dashboard for health managers and policymakers to monitor the pandemic, particularly in vulnerable populations.

Vincent Cubaka of Partners In Health in the U.S. will build robust data governance structures to enable the utilization of electronic medical records from multiple countries for research purposes to improve health. So-called FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data principles enhance the value of personal medical records for research, and CARE principles were developed to protect the owners of these data. However, the rigidity of these principles can create conflicts, which can make it difficult, for example, to open access to datasets across different countries. To address this, for their current project studying the impact of COVID-19 on chronic care patients across four low- and middle-income countries, they will develop data governance structures and set-up a multi-country community oversight committee to enable full access by researchers to appropriately de-identified individual-level data on a suitable platform.

Haroon Hafeez of Shaukat Khanum Memorial Cancer Hospital and Research Centre in Pakistan will develop a framework for the re-use of large clinical and administrative datasets to enable comparative analysis of COVID-19 vaccine safety and effectiveness in Pakistan and in Brazil, with colleagues at Fiocruz there, to improve pandemic responses and promote data-driven evidence generation in the Global South. Monitoring vaccinations across different settings is crucial for containing pandemics. However, comparative analysis of large health datasets in different scenarios is challenging due to concerns around safety and reproducibility and the loss of the context in which the data was collected, which can affect research results. They will adapt data science standards and tools to different local health system scenarios and run individual and joint vaccine effectiveness analyses for the two countries to assess compatibility and reproducibility of the findings. They will also build a public data visualization dashboard for health managers and policymakers to monitor the pandemic, particularly in vulnerable populations.

Luc Samison of Centre d'Infectiologie Charles Mérieux - University of Antananarivo in Madagascar will support more responsive and resilient antimicrobial resistance (AMR) surveillance systems in Madagascar and Burkina Faso by building a data science center for the electronic collection, analysis and dissemination of data. They will develop and refine data collection tools and sharing processes to promote multi-disciplinary collaborations and strengthen data governance and standards. These will be applied to detecting multi-drug resistant Escherichia coli and Enterobacteriaceae in several settings including pregnant women, hospitalized patients, chickens and surface water. They will also develop new tools and processes to provide stakeholders with strategic AMR indicators in real-time to support decision-making. This project will also support data-centered health research on AMR surveillance and can be applied to a range of pathogen surveillance settings in other low- and middle-income countries.

Damazo Kadengye of the African Population and Health Research Center in Kenya will establish a functional Learning Health System to promote the exploration of population health data from multiple sources to improve public health responses to infectious diseases in sub-Saharan Africa. Utilizing the data revolution to generate new knowledge is crucial for achieving global health targets, but there is a lack of suitable tools and limited access to data from different sources. They will integrate multiple large HIV/AIDS datasets from 11 longitudinal population cohorts in East Africa and develop an organizational architecture that enhances data discoverability and promotes responsible open data sharing, supporting collaborations between healthcare professionals, policy makers and researchers. They will also train scientists to produce data-based evidence using data science tools and predictive statistical models and to work with policy makers at local and national levels.