Working in collaboration to address Gates Grand Challenge
Establishing themselves as a key player in the global fight against major diseases, The George Institute, India recently commenced a project in India in collaboration with the University of Queensland in Australia and Washington, Harvard and Johns Hopkins Universities in the United States, which has received funding from The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to enable accurate measurement of health status in developing countries.
The project, called the Population Health Metrics Research Consortium Project, will develop tools to improve measurement of mortality and causes of death, which are expected to help policymakers address persistent inequities in health in low and middle income regions. Institute investigators will be working in the Andhra Pradesh state in India, while other collaborators will be doing similar studies in northern India, the Philippines and Tanzania.
Lead researchers of the project at The George Institute, India, Professor Lalit Dandona and Dr Rakhi Dandona bring a wealth of research experience to the task. Head of Population Health Research Dr Rakhi Dandona says "This project is a collaboration between highly regarded scientific teams from around the world and we are thrilled to be a part of the team working on this vital project. It pursues a creative research approach, blending epidemiology, biomedical research, and population health assessment."
The Gates funding of the project is part of its Grand Challenges in Global Health initiative, aiming to produce new measurement tools that are science-based, standardised and widely applicable across different resource-poor settings. The Institute will be working on Grand Challenge #13 - Reliable methods of estimating population health status, which are central for planning health improvements in any population. Such methods are currently deficient in the less developed settings where health improvement planning is most needed.
The first project-wide meeting of the Indian and international collaborators was hosted by The George Institute, India in Hyderabad on 29-30 November 2007 to discuss the data collected so far and to plan analysis. Representatives of all collaborators also attended the opening ceremony of The George Institute, India on 28 November 2007.