The SELeCT Project Will Strengthen Capacities of the St. Joseph’s Catholic Hospital of Monrovia to Fight against Ebola

Dr. Alfredo Mayor, researcher at ISGlobal and Dr. Peter Dawo, director of the Saint Joseph´s Catholic Hospital of Monrovia, participated in a workshop organized in the University of Ghana on February 10 and 11. The event brought together the grantees of the ‘European & Developing Countries Clinical Trials Partnership’ (EDCTP) and of the ‘Canadian Institutes of Health Research’ (CIHR).   The selected projects focus on Ebola disease and go from basic research to implementation and capacity building, and involve the collaboration between African and European or Canadian institutions.  

The SELeCT project is a consortium of ISGlobal, the St. Joseph’s Catholic Hospital of Monrovia and the Fundación Juan Ciudad NGO, and was one of the six proposals selected by EDCTP for funding. SELeCT is a result of the Ebola work group at ISGlobal, and its goal is to build and strengthen the laboratory capacities in the Monrovia Hospital to perform clinical trials during and between future outbreaks of Ebola and other infectious diseases. During 18 months, the hospital staff will receive training in good clinical and laboratory practices, will establish standard operating procedures for performing clinical trials, and will seek to engage the community and foster its acceptance of and participation in clinical trials. During the Ghana workshop, 32 representatives of the six projects selected by EDCTP and the twelve projects selected by CIHR exchanged information, and explored approaches to learn from and complement each other as well as to maximise the impact of the projects   The organizers hope that the meeting will have fostered future collaborations between funders, different regions of Africa and the grantees from both north and south.   

Along this line, Dr. Mayor points out: “Beyond training the personnel and equiping the laboratory, we hope that at the end of this project we can establish a long-lasting research collaboration with the St Joseph’s Hospital of Monrovia.” 

With the support of:

This project is part of the EDCTP2 programme supported by the European Union