We received ten (10) applications that were reviewed independently by three Global Health Programme Council members using a predefined scoring tool. During the review procedure, a conflict of interest (if any) was handled by a 4th reviewer. The total scores were then averaged across the reviewers, and consensus was reached across the reviewers about the interpretation of the score differences. The highest scoring application was awarded the grant.
The winning application entitled “Recurrent drug-resistant TB in the Western Cape: a longitudinal analysis” was submitted by a team of researchers from the Department of Global Health and the Centre for Tropical and Travel Medicine at the Amsterdam UMC (Sabine Hermans), the Department of Health Sciences at VU University (Frank van Leth) and Stellenbosch University (Rob Warren and Grant Theron).
The grant will allow for a postdoctoral fellow from Stellenbosch University to visit the Amsterdam UMC for a month. This will allow them to work alongside the epidemiological supervisors and thereby hone their epidemiological and statistical skills, and expand their network. This will also cement the AIGHD-SU collaboration allowing for expansion of the collaborative research topics from diagnostics studies to recurrent TB and the epidemiology of drug resistant TB. Understanding the epidemiology of recurrent drug-resistant TB and how this compares with drug-sensitive TB is important knowledge which will inform TB control policies, and how they can be tailored to match the local burden of drug-resistant TB disease.