Two new Global-NAMRIP projects funded for Africa
Two teams from NAMRIP have been awarded pump priming grants to enable them to do preparatory work, so that they can ‘hit the ground running’ if they win MRC grants which they submitted today to the Medical Research Council’s call 'AMR in a Global Context'.
The two bids:
‘Addressing Drivers of Resistant Sepsis in Africa’ (with Kenya Medical Research Institute),
and
‘Tackling AMR at the interface of food production and public health in Southern Africa’ (University of Malawi)
were primarily written by Merlin Willcox (Department of Primary Care and Population Sciences at the University of Southampton) and Alex Hughes (University of Newcastle), respectively.
The second grant represents further extension of the grant-winning collaboration between Alex and the Southampton team (Emma Roe, Neil Wrigley, Bill Keevil) which so successfully won an ESRC grant to look at food retail and AMR, set up a workshop with retailers and the Food Standards Agency. For this bid, they were joined by Myron Christodoulides (Inflammation Infection Immunology) and Dr Alister Munthali (from the Centre for Social Research, University of Malawi).
NAMRIP’s Steering Committee were so impressed by the quality of the bids, and supportive of the work, that they offered pump priming funding whether or not the bids were eventually successful with MRC, to allow the teams to make a start on these highly innovative projects. Professor Leighton said ‘It was clear that these teams would add to the knowledge that is critical important for finding effective interventions to mitigate the effects of AMR in Low/Middle Income countries, and even the small amount of help we could give in terms of pump priming would be extremely well used by these team in laying the groundwork for the larger studies which I very much hope they will get funded to do.’