Over £13m total funding will support projects focusing on HIV, climate and health, health worker unemployment, and the role of technology
Four research teams at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) have been awarded Wellcome Discovery Awards so far this year to investigate a range of health challenges.
Wellcome's Discovery Awards are highly competitive among researchers, attracting significant numbers of applications each round. The scheme provides funding for established researchers and teams from any discipline looking to pursue bold and creative research ideas, and deliver significant shifts in understanding of human life, health and wellbeing.
Through the award, Clinical Professor Rashida Ferrand will lead ARTFUL AGING, a seven-year study investigating how mechanisms underlying biological ageing may limit trajectories of growth, physical and cognitive function in children growing up with HIV. Working alongside various partners including the Biomedical Research and Training Institute (BRTI), the research will centre around a cohort study of 800 children, living with and without HIV in Zimbabwe.
Professor Ferrand said: "Advances in HIV treatment now mean large numbers of children born with HIV can survive to adulthood. However, while this is a remarkable public health achievement, these children experience a substantial burden of 'silent' co-morbidities as they develop, resulting for many in considerable disability and a decreased proportion of life lived with good health. This has received little attention within existing HIV programmes and we hope our project will provide significant evidence to address this."
Professor Antonio Gasparrini will lead CONNECT, a project connecting geospatial modelling of environmental stressors like air pollution, temperature extremes and green space, with health data from UK cohort studies spanning millions of participants.
Professor Gasparrini said: "Climate change and environmental degradation pose growing threats to human health but critical gaps remain in understanding the relationship between exposure and disease, vulnerable populations and underlying biological mechanisms. Our project will focus on the UK, leveraging its world-leading health data infrastructure including the UK biobank. We hope CONNECT will reveal exactly how climate change harms health, for instance, which individuals and groups face the highest risks from heatwaves or air pollution and need protection the most."
Associate Professor Eleanor Hutchinson will lead the five-year "Not Enough and Too Many" study. Alongside partners at the University of Nigeria, Makerere University and the University of Zambia, the project will examine the causes and consequences of mass unemployment, underemployment and precarious employment among doctors and nurses in Nigeria, Uganda and Zambia.
Associate Professor Hutchinson said: "By 2030, it is anticipated that Africa will face a shortage of nearly 6.1 million health workers. Simultaneously, approximately 700,000 trained health workers on the continent are expected to be without formal employment. We aim to understand why countries most in need of healthcare professionals often have the highest rates of health worker unemployment and how this affects families, communities, and national health systems. We hope to have changed narratives by 2030, placing the paradoxical surplus of health workers on the continent as the central problem for health systems."
Professor James Hargreaves will lead the "Breaking the inverse laws" project, bringing together researchers from across Zimbabwe, Zambia, The Gambia, South Africa and Kenya to develop a new equity framework aimed at stopping new technologies from widening infectious disease inequalities.
Professor Hargreaves said: "Advances in technology have great potential to accelerate infectious disease prevention and control, but as researchers and practitioners working in the region most affected, sub-Saharan Africa, we consistently see that richer countries and more advantaged groups are better enabled to take advantage of new technologies. This compounds patterns of infectious disease risk and poorer access to health services among disadvantaged populations, and is a phenomenon we refer to as 'the inverse laws'. Our Infectious Disease Equity Consortium ("The InDiE Consortium") will investigate how to break the inverse laws, focusing on four major infectious diseases: HIV/AIDS, Human Papilloma Virus which is the major cause of cervical cancer, measles and outbreak-prone infections, starting with cholera."
