/ en /blog/whyiscience-qa-how-global-collaboration-boosting-science-and-public-health-senegal <span class="field field--name-title field--type-string field--label-hidden"><h1>#WhyIScience Q&amp;A: How a global collaboration is boosting science and public health in Senegal</h1> </span> <span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"> <span>By Corie Lok</span> </span> <span class="field field--name-created field--type-created field--label-hidden"><time datetime="2020-01-16T10:12:08-05:00" class="datetime">January 16, 2020</time> </span> <div class="hero-section container"> <div class="hero-section__row row"> <div class="hero-section__content hero-section__content_left col-6"> <div class="hero-section__breadcrumbs"> <div class="block block-system block-system-breadcrumb-block"> <nav class="breadcrumb" role="navigation" aria-labelledby="system-breadcrumb"> <h2 id="system-breadcrumb" class="visually-hidden">Breadcrumb</h2> <ol> <li> <a href="/">Home</a> </li> <li> <a href="/news">News</a> </li> </ol> </nav> </div> </div> <div class="hero-section__title"> <div class="block block-layout-builder block-field-blocknodeblogtitle"> <span class="field field--name-title field--type-string field--label-hidden"><h1>#WhyIScience Q&amp;A: How a global collaboration is boosting science and public health in Senegal</h1> </span> </div> </div> <div class="hero-section__description"> <div class="block block-layout-builder block-field-blocknodeblogbody"> <div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item"> <p>Aida Badiane and Katie Siddle talk about their work on malaria and other fever-causing pathogens and the changes they’ve seen in public health and research in the West African country.</p> </div> </div> </div> <div class="hero-section__author"> <div class="block block-layout-builder block-field-blocknodebloguid"> <span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"> <span>By Corie Lok</span> </span> </div> </div> <div class="hero-section__date"> <div class="block block-layout-builder block-field-blocknodeblogcreated"> <span class="field field--name-created field--type-created field--label-hidden"><time datetime="2020-01-16T10:12:08-05:00" class="datetime">January 16, 2020</time> </span> </div> </div> </div> <div class="hero-section__right col-6"> <div class="hero-section__image"> <div class="block block-layout-builder block-field-blocknodeblogfield-image"> <div class="field field--name-field-image field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden field__item"> <article class="media media--type-image media--view-mode-multiple-content-types-header"> <div class="field field--name-field-media-image field--type-image field--label-hidden field__item"> <picture> <source srcset="/files/styles/multiple_ct_header_desktop_xl/public/blog/images/2020/SiddleBadaine_main_v1.jpg?itok=6NaU94W_ 1x" media="all and (min-width: 1921px)" type="image/jpeg" width="754" height="503"> <source srcset="/files/styles/multiple_ct_header_desktop_xl/public/blog/images/2020/SiddleBadaine_main_v1.jpg?itok=6NaU94W_ 1x" media="all and (min-width: 1601px) and (max-width: 1920px)" type="image/jpeg" width="754" height="503"> <source srcset="/files/styles/multiple_ct_header_desktop/public/blog/images/2020/SiddleBadaine_main_v1.jpg?itok=ui9aOmGO 1x" media="all and (min-width: 1340px) and (max-width: 1600px)" type="image/jpeg" width="736" height="520"> <source srcset="/files/styles/multiple_ct_header_laptop/public/blog/images/2020/SiddleBadaine_main_v1.jpg?itok=VL4wYbxq 1x" media="all and (min-width: 800px) and (max-width: 1339px)" type="image/jpeg" width="641" height="451"> <source srcset="/files/styles/multiple_ct_header_tablet/public/blog/images/2020/SiddleBadaine_main_v1.jpg?itok=qFQ5TeIE 1x" media="all and (min-width: 540px) and (max-width: 799px)" type="image/jpeg" width="706" height="417"> <source srcset="/files/styles/multiple_ct_header_phone/public/blog/images/2020/SiddleBadaine_main_v1.jpg?itok=_Kvub3b9 1x" media="all and (max-width: 539px)" type="image/jpeg" width="499" height="294"> <img loading="eager" width="499" height="294" src="/files/styles/multiple_ct_header_phone/public/blog/images/2020/SiddleBadaine_main_v1.jpg?itok=_Kvub3b9" alt="Aida Badiane (left) and Katie Siddle (right)" title="Aida Badiane (left) and Katie Siddle (right)" typeof="foaf:Image"> </picture> </div> <div class="media-caption"> <div class="media-caption__credit"> Credit: Scott Sassone </div> <div class="media-caption__description"> Aida Badiane (left) and Katie Siddle (right) </div> </div> </article> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div class="content-section content-section_with-sidebars container"> <div class="row"> <div class="content-section__left col-2"> <div class="block block-better-social-sharing-buttons block-social-sharing-buttons-block"> <div style="display: none"><link rel="preload" href="/modules/contrib/better_social_sharing_buttons/assets/dist/sprites/social-icons--no-color.svg" as="image" type="image/svg+xml" crossorigin="anonymous"></div> <div class="social-sharing-buttons"> <a href="https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=/taxonomy/term/1906/feed&amp;title=" target="_blank" title="Share to Facebook" aria-label="Share to Facebook" class="social-sharing-buttons-button share-facebook" rel="noopener"> <svg aria-hidden="true" width="32px" height="32px" style="border-radius:100%;"> <use href="/modules/contrib/better_social_sharing_buttons/assets/dist/sprites/social-icons--no-color.svg#facebook" /> </svg> </a> <a href="https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=+/taxonomy/term/1906/feed" target="_blank" title="Share to X" aria-label="Share to X" class="social-sharing-buttons-button share-x" rel="noopener"> <svg aria-hidden="true" width="32px" height="32px" style="border-radius:100%;"> <use href="/modules/contrib/better_social_sharing_buttons/assets/dist/sprites/social-icons--no-color.svg#x" /> </svg> </a> <a href="mailto:?subject=&amp;body=/taxonomy/term/1906/feed" title="Share to Email" aria-label="Share to Email" class="social-sharing-buttons-button share-email" target="_blank" rel="noopener"> <svg aria-hidden="true" width="32px" height="32px" style="border-radius:100%;"> <use href="/modules/contrib/better_social_sharing_buttons/assets/dist/sprites/social-icons--no-color.svg#email" /> </svg> </a> </div> </div> </div> <div class="content-section__main col-8"> <div class="block block-layout-builder block-field-blocknodeblogbody"> <div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item"><p> For more than two decades, infectious disease researchers at University Cheikh Anta Diop (UCAD) in Dakar, Senegal, the Ó³»­´«Ã½ of MIT and Harvard, and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health have worked together, using genomic technologies, to learn about how malaria parasites spread and how they can be stopped. During that time, there has been a significant decline in the burden of malaria in the West African country. This success is now allowing UCAD and Ó³»­´«Ã½ researchers to study other kinds of pathogens that cause malaria-like illness.</p> <p> Two of those collaborators, Aida Badiane and Katie Siddle, recently sat down with us in a&nbsp;global health edition of a #WhyIScience Q&amp;A to talk about their latest work and the impact of their collaboration on science and public health in Senegal.&nbsp;Their research is part of the <a href="/node/625131">Ó³»­´«Ã½ Global Health Initiative</a>, which aims to use Ó³»­´«Ã½ science and strong partnerships to tackle global health challenges.</p> <p><iframe allow="encrypted-media" allowfullscreen frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/izxZUEDhtzc" width="560"></iframe></p> <p> Badiane is a professor of parasitology and mycology at UCAD who started out doing lab research on malaria drug-resistance and immunology, but in the last year has moved into public health and field research. She is recruiting patients from clinics and communities to participate in studies on how to use genetic data from malaria parasites in their blood to develop and assess strategies for malaria control and elimination in Senegal.&nbsp;</p> <p> Siddle is a postdoc in <a href="https://www.sabetilab.org/" target="_blank">Pardis Sabeti’s lab</a> at the Ó³»­´«Ã½ and Harvard University. She has been working with Badiane and others at UCAD for the last five years to use sequencing and other genomic approaches to understand the epidemiology of infectious diseases beyond malaria, including those typically caused by viruses.&nbsp;</p> <p> <strong>Q: Why has malaria prevalence decreased so much in Senegal?&nbsp;</strong></p> <p> <strong>Badiane</strong>: That has been a result of decades of effort by our country’s National Malaria Control Program (NMCP), including their research and collaboration with scientists in Senegal. Scientists have helped the NMCP assess their strategies, such as introducing bed nets, that have really helped to bring down the number of malaria cases.&nbsp;</p> <p> <strong>Q: Now that there’s so much less malaria, how has that affected your research?</strong></p> <p> <strong>Siddle</strong>: Even though malaria incidence is declining in Senegal, we still have a lot of patients coming in with acute fevers and other symptoms similar to malaria. We’re trying to understand what are the other causes of these diseases. We're using genome sequencing methods to look in an unbiased way in samples from these patients to see if we can detect what may be the cause of this infection.</p> <p> We've been identifying some viruses, like dengue virus, and also some bacterial infections, like <em>Borrelia</em>, as possible causes. We’re hoping that we can build this project out further and study the causes of non-malarial fevers in different demographic and climatic environments across Senegal. We think that the dominant causes of non-malarial fevers will be different in these different areas.&nbsp;</p> <p> <strong>Badiane</strong>: I began my research in malaria, and now I have begun to learn about other pathogens. I hope that this collaboration with the Ó³»­´«Ã½ can be extended to other diseases, so that we can learn as much about them as we have about malaria.</p> <p> <strong>Q: Why is it important to learn about these other pathogens?</strong></p> <p> <strong>Badiane</strong>: I think this will help our clinicians in Senegal to think about other causes of illness&nbsp; beyond malaria, because when the malaria test comes back negative, they tend to just give antibiotics, without knowing what the cause of the fever is. And this is a cause of drug resistance in bacteria. Reducing antibiotic resistance is one of the objectives of our Ministry of Health.</p> <p> <img alt src="/files/news/stories/IMG-20190927-WA0007.jpg" style="width: 100%;"><em>At a health center near Kolda, Senegal, Siddle and Badiane review patient enrollment for malaria drug efficacy studies. Credit:&nbsp;Abdoulaye Tine</em></p> <p> <strong>Q: Another way that scientists at UCAD and the Ó³»­´«Ã½ have been collaborating is through a program that trains scientists in genomic technologies and analysis. What has been the impact of this training?</strong></p> <p> <strong>Siddle</strong>: This training is part of a program called the <a href="http://acegid.org/index.php" target="_blank">African Center&nbsp;of Excellence in Genomics of Infectious Disease</a>, which is funded by the World Bank. Through this program, we have trained lab scientists and bioinformaticians from across West Africa, including Senegal, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Liberia, on genomic sequencing methods and data analysis.&nbsp;</p> <p> One of the biggest changes I've seen from this program is an acceleration in how people are taking those techniques and applying them to new questions. In the beginning, people were&nbsp; mostly just using the techniques in the way that had been taught in the training program.</p> <p> But more recently, students have been taking those techniques and applying them to new questions, and in particular bringing them back to malaria, and applying those same sequencing techniques to now address questions like drug resistance and the genetic diversity of malaria. That's really cool to see: people are taking these techniques and applying them to questions that they're interested in, and thinking beyond applying them to one particular pathogen or problem.</p> <p> <strong>Badiane</strong>: This training is having a huge impact on students, and also for all of us. I and many scientists in my lab have been trained in courses taught by researchers from the Ó³»­´«Ã½ and Harvard, and over the years, the capacity-building and technology transfer have also benefited our labs in Senegal. This has been tremendously helpful for the research at UCAD. We are now well equipped with the latest tools and techniques, such as next-generation sequencing, and we are able to run the technology ourselves.&nbsp;</p> <p> We do face problems with ordering reagents due to the fact that many institutions in Africa do not use these technologies, but we hope that these problems will be solved in the future. Nevertheless, many students are doing their thesis projects entirely within Senegal and this was possible because of the training, technology transfer and support of our partners at the Ó³»­´«Ã½.</p> </div> </div> <div class="block-node-broad-tags block block-layout-builder block-field-blocknodeblogfield-broad-tags"> <div class="block-node-broad-tags__row"> <div class="block-node-broad-tags__title">Tags:</div> <div class="field field--name-field-broad-tags field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden field__items"> <div class="field__item"><a href="/broad-tags/broad-global-health-initiative" hreflang="en">Ó³»­´«Ã½ Global Health Initiative</a></div> <div class="field__item"><a href="/broad-tags/infectious-disease-and-microbiome-0" hreflang="en">Infectious Disease and Microbiome Program</a></div> <div class="field__item"><a href="/broad-tags/viral-genomics" hreflang="en">Viral genomics</a></div> <div class="field__item"><a href="/broad-tags/infectious-disease-and-microbiome" hreflang="en">Infectious Disease and Microbiome</a></div> <div class="field__item"><a href="/broad-tags/pardis-sabeti" hreflang="en">Pardis Sabeti</a></div> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div class="content-section__right col-2"> <div class="block block-ctools block-entity-viewnode"> <article about="/blog/whyiscience-qa-how-global-collaboration-boosting-science-and-public-health-senegal" class="node node--type-blog node--promoted node--view-mode-sidebar"> <div class="node__content"> <div class="sidebar-group"> <div class="sidebar-group__content"> <div class="block block-layout-builder block-field-blocknodeblogfield-blog-extra-info"> <div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-field-blog-extra-info field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field__item"><h2> RELATED PROGRAMS</h2> <p> <a href="/node/8543/">Infectious Disease and Microbiome</a></p> <p> &nbsp;</p> <p> &nbsp;</p> <h2> RELATED NEWS</h2> <p> <img alt src="/files/news/stories/viral_fishing.jpg" style="width: 212px; height: 158px;"></p> <p> <a href="/node/454526/">New disease surveillance tool helps detect any human virus</a></p> <p> &nbsp;</p> <p> <img alt src="/files/news/stories/Sebeti-lab-paper.jpg" style="width: 212px; height: 158px;"></p> <p> <a href="/node/377281/">Rapid genomic sequencing of Lassa virus in Nigeria enabled real-time response to 2018 outbreak</a></p> <p> &nbsp;</p> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </article> </div> </div> </div> </div> Thu, 16 Jan 2020 15:12:08 +0000 Corie Lok 626836 at /broad-global-health-initiative <span class="field field--name-title field--type-string field--label-hidden"><h1>#WhyIScience Q&amp;A: How a global collaboration is boosting science and public health in Senegal</h1> </span> <span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"> <span>By Corie Lok</span> </span> <span class="field field--name-created field--type-created field--label-hidden"><time datetime="2020-01-16T10:12:08-05:00" class="datetime">January 16, 2020</time> </span> <div class="hero-section container"> <div class="hero-section__row row"> <div class="hero-section__content hero-section__content_left col-6"> <div class="hero-section__breadcrumbs"> <div class="block block-system block-system-breadcrumb-block"> <nav class="breadcrumb" role="navigation" aria-labelledby="system-breadcrumb"> <h2 id="system-breadcrumb" class="visually-hidden">Breadcrumb</h2> <ol> <li> <a href="/">Home</a> </li> <li> <a href="/news">News</a> </li> </ol> </nav> </div> </div> <div class="hero-section__title"> <div class="block block-layout-builder block-field-blocknodeblogtitle"> <span class="field field--name-title field--type-string field--label-hidden"><h1>#WhyIScience Q&amp;A: How a global collaboration is boosting science and public health in Senegal</h1> </span> </div> </div> <div class="hero-section__description"> <div class="block block-layout-builder block-field-blocknodeblogbody"> <div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item"> <p>Aida Badiane and Katie Siddle talk about their work on malaria and other fever-causing pathogens and the changes they’ve seen in public health and research in the West African country.</p> </div> </div> </div> <div class="hero-section__author"> <div class="block block-layout-builder block-field-blocknodebloguid"> <span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"> <span>By Corie Lok</span> </span> </div> </div> <div class="hero-section__date"> <div class="block block-layout-builder block-field-blocknodeblogcreated"> <span class="field field--name-created field--type-created field--label-hidden"><time datetime="2020-01-16T10:12:08-05:00" class="datetime">January 16, 2020</time> </span> </div> </div> </div> <div class="hero-section__right col-6"> <div class="hero-section__image"> <div class="block block-layout-builder block-field-blocknodeblogfield-image"> <div class="field field--name-field-image field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden field__item"> <article class="media media--type-image media--view-mode-multiple-content-types-header"> <div class="field field--name-field-media-image field--type-image field--label-hidden field__item"> <picture> <source srcset="/files/styles/multiple_ct_header_desktop_xl/public/blog/images/2020/SiddleBadaine_main_v1.jpg?itok=6NaU94W_ 1x" media="all and (min-width: 1921px)" type="image/jpeg" width="754" height="503"> <source srcset="/files/styles/multiple_ct_header_desktop_xl/public/blog/images/2020/SiddleBadaine_main_v1.jpg?itok=6NaU94W_ 1x" media="all and (min-width: 1601px) and (max-width: 1920px)" type="image/jpeg" width="754" height="503"> <source srcset="/files/styles/multiple_ct_header_desktop/public/blog/images/2020/SiddleBadaine_main_v1.jpg?itok=ui9aOmGO 1x" media="all and (min-width: 1340px) and (max-width: 1600px)" type="image/jpeg" width="736" height="520"> <source srcset="/files/styles/multiple_ct_header_laptop/public/blog/images/2020/SiddleBadaine_main_v1.jpg?itok=VL4wYbxq 1x" media="all and (min-width: 800px) and (max-width: 1339px)" type="image/jpeg" width="641" height="451"> <source srcset="/files/styles/multiple_ct_header_tablet/public/blog/images/2020/SiddleBadaine_main_v1.jpg?itok=qFQ5TeIE 1x" media="all and (min-width: 540px) and (max-width: 799px)" type="image/jpeg" width="706" height="417"> <source srcset="/files/styles/multiple_ct_header_phone/public/blog/images/2020/SiddleBadaine_main_v1.jpg?itok=_Kvub3b9 1x" media="all and (max-width: 539px)" type="image/jpeg" width="499" height="294"> <img loading="eager" width="499" height="294" src="/files/styles/multiple_ct_header_phone/public/blog/images/2020/SiddleBadaine_main_v1.jpg?itok=_Kvub3b9" alt="Aida Badiane (left) and Katie Siddle (right)" title="Aida Badiane (left) and Katie Siddle (right)" typeof="foaf:Image"> </picture> </div> <div class="media-caption"> <div class="media-caption__credit"> Credit: Scott Sassone </div> <div class="media-caption__description"> Aida Badiane (left) and Katie Siddle (right) </div> </div> </article> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div class="content-section content-section_with-sidebars container"> <div class="row"> <div class="content-section__left col-2"> <div class="block block-better-social-sharing-buttons block-social-sharing-buttons-block"> <div style="display: none"><link rel="preload" href="/modules/contrib/better_social_sharing_buttons/assets/dist/sprites/social-icons--no-color.svg" as="image" type="image/svg+xml" crossorigin="anonymous"></div> <div class="social-sharing-buttons"> <a href="https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=/taxonomy/term/1906/feed&amp;title=" target="_blank" title="Share to Facebook" aria-label="Share to Facebook" class="social-sharing-buttons-button share-facebook" rel="noopener"> <svg aria-hidden="true" width="32px" height="32px" style="border-radius:100%;"> <use 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class="block block-layout-builder block-field-blocknodeblogbody"> <div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item"><p> For more than two decades, infectious disease researchers at University Cheikh Anta Diop (UCAD) in Dakar, Senegal, the Ó³»­´«Ã½ of MIT and Harvard, and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health have worked together, using genomic technologies, to learn about how malaria parasites spread and how they can be stopped. During that time, there has been a significant decline in the burden of malaria in the West African country. This success is now allowing UCAD and Ó³»­´«Ã½ researchers to study other kinds of pathogens that cause malaria-like illness.</p> <p> Two of those collaborators, Aida Badiane and Katie Siddle, recently sat down with us in a&nbsp;global health edition of a #WhyIScience Q&amp;A to talk about their latest work and the impact of their collaboration on science and public health in Senegal.&nbsp;Their research is part of the <a href="/node/625131">Ó³»­´«Ã½ Global Health Initiative</a>, which aims to use Ó³»­´«Ã½ science and strong partnerships to tackle global health challenges.</p> <p><iframe allow="encrypted-media" allowfullscreen frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/izxZUEDhtzc" width="560"></iframe></p> <p> Badiane is a professor of parasitology and mycology at UCAD who started out doing lab research on malaria drug-resistance and immunology, but in the last year has moved into public health and field research. She is recruiting patients from clinics and communities to participate in studies on how to use genetic data from malaria parasites in their blood to develop and assess strategies for malaria control and elimination in Senegal.&nbsp;</p> <p> Siddle is a postdoc in <a href="https://www.sabetilab.org/" target="_blank">Pardis Sabeti’s lab</a> at the Ó³»­´«Ã½ and Harvard University. She has been working with Badiane and others at UCAD for the last five years to use sequencing and other genomic approaches to understand the epidemiology of infectious diseases beyond malaria, including those typically caused by viruses.&nbsp;</p> <p> <strong>Q: Why has malaria prevalence decreased so much in Senegal?&nbsp;</strong></p> <p> <strong>Badiane</strong>: That has been a result of decades of effort by our country’s National Malaria Control Program (NMCP), including their research and collaboration with scientists in Senegal. Scientists have helped the NMCP assess their strategies, such as introducing bed nets, that have really helped to bring down the number of malaria cases.&nbsp;</p> <p> <strong>Q: Now that there’s so much less malaria, how has that affected your research?</strong></p> <p> <strong>Siddle</strong>: Even though malaria incidence is declining in Senegal, we still have a lot of patients coming in with acute fevers and other symptoms similar to malaria. We’re trying to understand what are the other causes of these diseases. We're using genome sequencing methods to look in an unbiased way in samples from these patients to see if we can detect what may be the cause of this infection.</p> <p> We've been identifying some viruses, like dengue virus, and also some bacterial infections, like <em>Borrelia</em>, as possible causes. We’re hoping that we can build this project out further and study the causes of non-malarial fevers in different demographic and climatic environments across Senegal. We think that the dominant causes of non-malarial fevers will be different in these different areas.&nbsp;</p> <p> <strong>Badiane</strong>: I began my research in malaria, and now I have begun to learn about other pathogens. I hope that this collaboration with the Ó³»­´«Ã½ can be extended to other diseases, so that we can learn as much about them as we have about malaria.</p> <p> <strong>Q: Why is it important to learn about these other pathogens?</strong></p> <p> <strong>Badiane</strong>: I think this will help our clinicians in Senegal to think about other causes of illness&nbsp; beyond malaria, because when the malaria test comes back negative, they tend to just give antibiotics, without knowing what the cause of the fever is. And this is a cause of drug resistance in bacteria. Reducing antibiotic resistance is one of the objectives of our Ministry of Health.</p> <p> <img alt src="/files/news/stories/IMG-20190927-WA0007.jpg" style="width: 100%;"><em>At a health center near Kolda, Senegal, Siddle and Badiane review patient enrollment for malaria drug efficacy studies. Credit:&nbsp;Abdoulaye Tine</em></p> <p> <strong>Q: Another way that scientists at UCAD and the Ó³»­´«Ã½ have been collaborating is through a program that trains scientists in genomic technologies and analysis. What has been the impact of this training?</strong></p> <p> <strong>Siddle</strong>: This training is part of a program called the <a href="http://acegid.org/index.php" target="_blank">African Center&nbsp;of Excellence in Genomics of Infectious Disease</a>, which is funded by the World Bank. Through this program, we have trained lab scientists and bioinformaticians from across West Africa, including Senegal, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Liberia, on genomic sequencing methods and data analysis.&nbsp;</p> <p> One of the biggest changes I've seen from this program is an acceleration in how people are taking those techniques and applying them to new questions. In the beginning, people were&nbsp; mostly just using the techniques in the way that had been taught in the training program.</p> <p> But more recently, students have been taking those techniques and applying them to new questions, and in particular bringing them back to malaria, and applying those same sequencing techniques to now address questions like drug resistance and the genetic diversity of malaria. That's really cool to see: people are taking these techniques and applying them to questions that they're interested in, and thinking beyond applying them to one particular pathogen or problem.</p> <p> <strong>Badiane</strong>: This training is having a huge impact on students, and also for all of us. I and many scientists in my lab have been trained in courses taught by researchers from the Ó³»­´«Ã½ and Harvard, and over the years, the capacity-building and technology transfer have also benefited our labs in Senegal. This has been tremendously helpful for the research at UCAD. We are now well equipped with the latest tools and techniques, such as next-generation sequencing, and we are able to run the technology ourselves.&nbsp;</p> <p> We do face problems with ordering reagents due to the fact that many institutions in Africa do not use these technologies, but we hope that these problems will be solved in the future. Nevertheless, many students are doing their thesis projects entirely within Senegal and this was possible because of the training, technology transfer and support of our partners at the Ó³»­´«Ã½.</p> </div> </div> <div class="block-node-broad-tags block block-layout-builder block-field-blocknodeblogfield-broad-tags"> <div class="block-node-broad-tags__row"> <div class="block-node-broad-tags__title">Tags:</div> <div class="field field--name-field-broad-tags field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden field__items"> <div class="field__item"><a href="/broad-tags/broad-global-health-initiative" hreflang="en">Ó³»­´«Ã½ Global Health Initiative</a></div> <div class="field__item"><a href="/broad-tags/infectious-disease-and-microbiome-0" hreflang="en">Infectious Disease and Microbiome Program</a></div> <div class="field__item"><a href="/broad-tags/viral-genomics" hreflang="en">Viral genomics</a></div> <div class="field__item"><a href="/broad-tags/infectious-disease-and-microbiome" hreflang="en">Infectious Disease and Microbiome</a></div> <div class="field__item"><a href="/broad-tags/pardis-sabeti" hreflang="en">Pardis Sabeti</a></div> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div class="content-section__right col-2"> <div class="block block-ctools block-entity-viewnode"> <article about="/blog/whyiscience-qa-how-global-collaboration-boosting-science-and-public-health-senegal" class="node node--type-blog node--promoted node--view-mode-sidebar"> <div class="node__content"> <div class="sidebar-group"> <div class="sidebar-group__content"> <div class="block block-layout-builder block-field-blocknodeblogfield-blog-extra-info"> <div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-field-blog-extra-info field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field__item"><h2> RELATED PROGRAMS</h2> <p> <a href="/node/8543/">Infectious Disease and Microbiome</a></p> <p> &nbsp;</p> <p> &nbsp;</p> <h2> RELATED NEWS</h2> <p> <img alt src="/files/news/stories/viral_fishing.jpg" style="width: 212px; height: 158px;"></p> <p> <a href="/node/454526/">New disease surveillance tool helps detect any human virus</a></p> <p> &nbsp;</p> <p> <img alt src="/files/news/stories/Sebeti-lab-paper.jpg" style="width: 212px; height: 158px;"></p> <p> <a href="/node/377281/">Rapid genomic sequencing of Lassa virus in Nigeria enabled real-time response to 2018 outbreak</a></p> <p> &nbsp;</p> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </article> </div> </div> </div> </div> Tue, 12 Nov 2019 20:26:50 +0000 mnemchuk@broadinstitute.org 625131 at /news/crispr-enzyme-programmed-kill-viruses-human-cells <span class="field field--name-title field--type-string field--label-hidden"><h1>#WhyIScience Q&amp;A: How a global collaboration is boosting science and public health in Senegal</h1> </span> <span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"> <span>By Corie Lok</span> </span> <span class="field field--name-created field--type-created field--label-hidden"><time datetime="2020-01-16T10:12:08-05:00" class="datetime">January 16, 2020</time> </span> <div class="hero-section container"> <div class="hero-section__row row"> <div class="hero-section__content hero-section__content_left col-6"> <div class="hero-section__breadcrumbs"> <div class="block block-system block-system-breadcrumb-block"> <nav class="breadcrumb" role="navigation" aria-labelledby="system-breadcrumb"> <h2 id="system-breadcrumb" class="visually-hidden">Breadcrumb</h2> <ol> <li> <a href="/">Home</a> </li> <li> <a href="/news">News</a> </li> </ol> </nav> </div> </div> <div class="hero-section__title"> <div class="block block-layout-builder block-field-blocknodeblogtitle"> <span class="field field--name-title field--type-string field--label-hidden"><h1>#WhyIScience Q&amp;A: How a global collaboration is boosting science and public health in Senegal</h1> </span> </div> </div> <div class="hero-section__description"> <div class="block block-layout-builder block-field-blocknodeblogbody"> <div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item"> <p>Aida Badiane and Katie Siddle talk about their work on malaria and other fever-causing pathogens and the changes they’ve seen in public health and research in the West African country.</p> </div> </div> </div> <div class="hero-section__author"> <div class="block block-layout-builder block-field-blocknodebloguid"> <span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"> <span>By Corie Lok</span> </span> </div> </div> <div class="hero-section__date"> <div class="block block-layout-builder block-field-blocknodeblogcreated"> <span class="field field--name-created field--type-created field--label-hidden"><time datetime="2020-01-16T10:12:08-05:00" class="datetime">January 16, 2020</time> </span> </div> </div> </div> <div class="hero-section__right col-6"> <div class="hero-section__image"> <div class="block block-layout-builder block-field-blocknodeblogfield-image"> <div class="field field--name-field-image field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden field__item"> <article class="media media--type-image media--view-mode-multiple-content-types-header"> <div class="field field--name-field-media-image field--type-image field--label-hidden field__item"> <picture> <source srcset="/files/styles/multiple_ct_header_desktop_xl/public/blog/images/2020/SiddleBadaine_main_v1.jpg?itok=6NaU94W_ 1x" media="all and (min-width: 1921px)" type="image/jpeg" width="754" height="503"> <source srcset="/files/styles/multiple_ct_header_desktop_xl/public/blog/images/2020/SiddleBadaine_main_v1.jpg?itok=6NaU94W_ 1x" media="all and (min-width: 1601px) and (max-width: 1920px)" type="image/jpeg" width="754" height="503"> <source srcset="/files/styles/multiple_ct_header_desktop/public/blog/images/2020/SiddleBadaine_main_v1.jpg?itok=ui9aOmGO 1x" media="all and (min-width: 1340px) and (max-width: 1600px)" type="image/jpeg" width="736" height="520"> <source srcset="/files/styles/multiple_ct_header_laptop/public/blog/images/2020/SiddleBadaine_main_v1.jpg?itok=VL4wYbxq 1x" media="all and (min-width: 800px) and (max-width: 1339px)" type="image/jpeg" width="641" height="451"> <source srcset="/files/styles/multiple_ct_header_tablet/public/blog/images/2020/SiddleBadaine_main_v1.jpg?itok=qFQ5TeIE 1x" media="all and (min-width: 540px) and (max-width: 799px)" type="image/jpeg" width="706" height="417"> <source srcset="/files/styles/multiple_ct_header_phone/public/blog/images/2020/SiddleBadaine_main_v1.jpg?itok=_Kvub3b9 1x" media="all and (max-width: 539px)" type="image/jpeg" width="499" height="294"> <img loading="eager" width="499" height="294" src="/files/styles/multiple_ct_header_phone/public/blog/images/2020/SiddleBadaine_main_v1.jpg?itok=_Kvub3b9" alt="Aida Badiane (left) and Katie Siddle (right)" title="Aida Badiane (left) and Katie Siddle (right)" typeof="foaf:Image"> </picture> </div> <div class="media-caption"> <div class="media-caption__credit"> Credit: Scott Sassone </div> <div class="media-caption__description"> Aida Badiane (left) and Katie Siddle (right) </div> </div> </article> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div class="content-section content-section_with-sidebars container"> <div class="row"> <div class="content-section__left col-2"> <div class="block block-better-social-sharing-buttons block-social-sharing-buttons-block"> <div style="display: none"><link rel="preload" href="/modules/contrib/better_social_sharing_buttons/assets/dist/sprites/social-icons--no-color.svg" as="image" type="image/svg+xml" crossorigin="anonymous"></div> <div class="social-sharing-buttons"> <a href="https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=/taxonomy/term/1906/feed&amp;title=" target="_blank" title="Share to Facebook" aria-label="Share to Facebook" class="social-sharing-buttons-button share-facebook" rel="noopener"> <svg aria-hidden="true" width="32px" height="32px" style="border-radius:100%;"> <use 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class="block block-layout-builder block-field-blocknodeblogbody"> <div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item"><p> For more than two decades, infectious disease researchers at University Cheikh Anta Diop (UCAD) in Dakar, Senegal, the Ó³»­´«Ã½ of MIT and Harvard, and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health have worked together, using genomic technologies, to learn about how malaria parasites spread and how they can be stopped. During that time, there has been a significant decline in the burden of malaria in the West African country. This success is now allowing UCAD and Ó³»­´«Ã½ researchers to study other kinds of pathogens that cause malaria-like illness.</p> <p> Two of those collaborators, Aida Badiane and Katie Siddle, recently sat down with us in a&nbsp;global health edition of a #WhyIScience Q&amp;A to talk about their latest work and the impact of their collaboration on science and public health in Senegal.&nbsp;Their research is part of the <a href="/node/625131">Ó³»­´«Ã½ Global Health Initiative</a>, which aims to use Ó³»­´«Ã½ science and strong partnerships to tackle global health challenges.</p> <p><iframe allow="encrypted-media" allowfullscreen frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/izxZUEDhtzc" width="560"></iframe></p> <p> Badiane is a professor of parasitology and mycology at UCAD who started out doing lab research on malaria drug-resistance and immunology, but in the last year has moved into public health and field research. She is recruiting patients from clinics and communities to participate in studies on how to use genetic data from malaria parasites in their blood to develop and assess strategies for malaria control and elimination in Senegal.&nbsp;</p> <p> Siddle is a postdoc in <a href="https://www.sabetilab.org/" target="_blank">Pardis Sabeti’s lab</a> at the Ó³»­´«Ã½ and Harvard University. She has been working with Badiane and others at UCAD for the last five years to use sequencing and other genomic approaches to understand the epidemiology of infectious diseases beyond malaria, including those typically caused by viruses.&nbsp;</p> <p> <strong>Q: Why has malaria prevalence decreased so much in Senegal?&nbsp;</strong></p> <p> <strong>Badiane</strong>: That has been a result of decades of effort by our country’s National Malaria Control Program (NMCP), including their research and collaboration with scientists in Senegal. Scientists have helped the NMCP assess their strategies, such as introducing bed nets, that have really helped to bring down the number of malaria cases.&nbsp;</p> <p> <strong>Q: Now that there’s so much less malaria, how has that affected your research?</strong></p> <p> <strong>Siddle</strong>: Even though malaria incidence is declining in Senegal, we still have a lot of patients coming in with acute fevers and other symptoms similar to malaria. We’re trying to understand what are the other causes of these diseases. We're using genome sequencing methods to look in an unbiased way in samples from these patients to see if we can detect what may be the cause of this infection.</p> <p> We've been identifying some viruses, like dengue virus, and also some bacterial infections, like <em>Borrelia</em>, as possible causes. We’re hoping that we can build this project out further and study the causes of non-malarial fevers in different demographic and climatic environments across Senegal. We think that the dominant causes of non-malarial fevers will be different in these different areas.&nbsp;</p> <p> <strong>Badiane</strong>: I began my research in malaria, and now I have begun to learn about other pathogens. I hope that this collaboration with the Ó³»­´«Ã½ can be extended to other diseases, so that we can learn as much about them as we have about malaria.</p> <p> <strong>Q: Why is it important to learn about these other pathogens?</strong></p> <p> <strong>Badiane</strong>: I think this will help our clinicians in Senegal to think about other causes of illness&nbsp; beyond malaria, because when the malaria test comes back negative, they tend to just give antibiotics, without knowing what the cause of the fever is. And this is a cause of drug resistance in bacteria. Reducing antibiotic resistance is one of the objectives of our Ministry of Health.</p> <p> <img alt src="/files/news/stories/IMG-20190927-WA0007.jpg" style="width: 100%;"><em>At a health center near Kolda, Senegal, Siddle and Badiane review patient enrollment for malaria drug efficacy studies. Credit:&nbsp;Abdoulaye Tine</em></p> <p> <strong>Q: Another way that scientists at UCAD and the Ó³»­´«Ã½ have been collaborating is through a program that trains scientists in genomic technologies and analysis. What has been the impact of this training?</strong></p> <p> <strong>Siddle</strong>: This training is part of a program called the <a href="http://acegid.org/index.php" target="_blank">African Center&nbsp;of Excellence in Genomics of Infectious Disease</a>, which is funded by the World Bank. Through this program, we have trained lab scientists and bioinformaticians from across West Africa, including Senegal, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Liberia, on genomic sequencing methods and data analysis.&nbsp;</p> <p> One of the biggest changes I've seen from this program is an acceleration in how people are taking those techniques and applying them to new questions. In the beginning, people were&nbsp; mostly just using the techniques in the way that had been taught in the training program.</p> <p> But more recently, students have been taking those techniques and applying them to new questions, and in particular bringing them back to malaria, and applying those same sequencing techniques to now address questions like drug resistance and the genetic diversity of malaria. That's really cool to see: people are taking these techniques and applying them to questions that they're interested in, and thinking beyond applying them to one particular pathogen or problem.</p> <p> <strong>Badiane</strong>: This training is having a huge impact on students, and also for all of us. I and many scientists in my lab have been trained in courses taught by researchers from the Ó³»­´«Ã½ and Harvard, and over the years, the capacity-building and technology transfer have also benefited our labs in Senegal. This has been tremendously helpful for the research at UCAD. We are now well equipped with the latest tools and techniques, such as next-generation sequencing, and we are able to run the technology ourselves.&nbsp;</p> <p> We do face problems with ordering reagents due to the fact that many institutions in Africa do not use these technologies, but we hope that these problems will be solved in the future. Nevertheless, many students are doing their thesis projects entirely within Senegal and this was possible because of the training, technology transfer and support of our partners at the Ó³»­´«Ã½.</p> </div> </div> <div class="block-node-broad-tags block block-layout-builder block-field-blocknodeblogfield-broad-tags"> <div class="block-node-broad-tags__row"> <div class="block-node-broad-tags__title">Tags:</div> <div class="field field--name-field-broad-tags field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden field__items"> <div class="field__item"><a href="/broad-tags/broad-global-health-initiative" hreflang="en">Ó³»­´«Ã½ Global Health Initiative</a></div> <div class="field__item"><a href="/broad-tags/infectious-disease-and-microbiome-0" hreflang="en">Infectious Disease and Microbiome Program</a></div> <div class="field__item"><a href="/broad-tags/viral-genomics" hreflang="en">Viral genomics</a></div> <div class="field__item"><a href="/broad-tags/infectious-disease-and-microbiome" hreflang="en">Infectious Disease and Microbiome</a></div> <div class="field__item"><a href="/broad-tags/pardis-sabeti" hreflang="en">Pardis Sabeti</a></div> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div class="content-section__right col-2"> <div class="block block-ctools block-entity-viewnode"> <article about="/blog/whyiscience-qa-how-global-collaboration-boosting-science-and-public-health-senegal" class="node node--type-blog node--promoted node--view-mode-sidebar"> <div class="node__content"> <div class="sidebar-group"> <div class="sidebar-group__content"> <div class="block block-layout-builder block-field-blocknodeblogfield-blog-extra-info"> <div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-field-blog-extra-info field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field__item"><h2> RELATED PROGRAMS</h2> <p> <a href="/node/8543/">Infectious Disease and Microbiome</a></p> <p> &nbsp;</p> <p> &nbsp;</p> <h2> RELATED NEWS</h2> <p> <img alt src="/files/news/stories/viral_fishing.jpg" style="width: 212px; height: 158px;"></p> <p> <a href="/node/454526/">New disease surveillance tool helps detect any human virus</a></p> <p> &nbsp;</p> <p> <img alt src="/files/news/stories/Sebeti-lab-paper.jpg" style="width: 212px; height: 158px;"></p> <p> <a href="/node/377281/">Rapid genomic sequencing of Lassa virus in Nigeria enabled real-time response to 2018 outbreak</a></p> <p> &nbsp;</p> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </article> </div> </div> </div> </div> Thu, 10 Oct 2019 14:07:33 +0000 kzusi@broadinstitute.org 624656 at /news/large-study-reveals-ptsd-has-strong-genetic-component-other-psychiatric-disorders <span class="field field--name-title field--type-string field--label-hidden"><h1>#WhyIScience Q&amp;A: How a global collaboration is boosting science and public health in Senegal</h1> </span> <span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"> <span>By Corie Lok</span> </span> <span class="field field--name-created field--type-created field--label-hidden"><time datetime="2020-01-16T10:12:08-05:00" class="datetime">January 16, 2020</time> </span> <div class="hero-section container"> <div class="hero-section__row row"> <div class="hero-section__content hero-section__content_left col-6"> <div class="hero-section__breadcrumbs"> <div class="block block-system block-system-breadcrumb-block"> <nav class="breadcrumb" role="navigation" aria-labelledby="system-breadcrumb"> <h2 id="system-breadcrumb" class="visually-hidden">Breadcrumb</h2> <ol> <li> <a href="/">Home</a> </li> <li> <a href="/news">News</a> </li> </ol> </nav> </div> </div> <div class="hero-section__title"> <div class="block block-layout-builder block-field-blocknodeblogtitle"> <span class="field field--name-title field--type-string field--label-hidden"><h1>#WhyIScience Q&amp;A: How a global collaboration is boosting science and public health in Senegal</h1> </span> </div> </div> <div class="hero-section__description"> <div class="block block-layout-builder block-field-blocknodeblogbody"> <div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item"> <p>Aida Badiane and Katie Siddle talk about their work on malaria and other fever-causing pathogens and the changes they’ve seen in public health and research in the West African country.</p> </div> </div> </div> <div class="hero-section__author"> <div class="block block-layout-builder block-field-blocknodebloguid"> <span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"> <span>By Corie Lok</span> </span> </div> </div> <div class="hero-section__date"> <div class="block block-layout-builder block-field-blocknodeblogcreated"> <span class="field field--name-created field--type-created field--label-hidden"><time datetime="2020-01-16T10:12:08-05:00" class="datetime">January 16, 2020</time> </span> </div> </div> </div> <div class="hero-section__right col-6"> <div class="hero-section__image"> <div class="block block-layout-builder block-field-blocknodeblogfield-image"> <div class="field field--name-field-image field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden field__item"> <article class="media media--type-image media--view-mode-multiple-content-types-header"> <div class="field field--name-field-media-image field--type-image field--label-hidden field__item"> <picture> <source srcset="/files/styles/multiple_ct_header_desktop_xl/public/blog/images/2020/SiddleBadaine_main_v1.jpg?itok=6NaU94W_ 1x" media="all and (min-width: 1921px)" type="image/jpeg" width="754" height="503"> <source srcset="/files/styles/multiple_ct_header_desktop_xl/public/blog/images/2020/SiddleBadaine_main_v1.jpg?itok=6NaU94W_ 1x" media="all and (min-width: 1601px) and (max-width: 1920px)" type="image/jpeg" width="754" height="503"> <source srcset="/files/styles/multiple_ct_header_desktop/public/blog/images/2020/SiddleBadaine_main_v1.jpg?itok=ui9aOmGO 1x" media="all and (min-width: 1340px) and (max-width: 1600px)" type="image/jpeg" width="736" height="520"> <source srcset="/files/styles/multiple_ct_header_laptop/public/blog/images/2020/SiddleBadaine_main_v1.jpg?itok=VL4wYbxq 1x" media="all and (min-width: 800px) and (max-width: 1339px)" type="image/jpeg" width="641" height="451"> <source srcset="/files/styles/multiple_ct_header_tablet/public/blog/images/2020/SiddleBadaine_main_v1.jpg?itok=qFQ5TeIE 1x" media="all and (min-width: 540px) and (max-width: 799px)" type="image/jpeg" width="706" height="417"> <source srcset="/files/styles/multiple_ct_header_phone/public/blog/images/2020/SiddleBadaine_main_v1.jpg?itok=_Kvub3b9 1x" media="all and (max-width: 539px)" type="image/jpeg" width="499" height="294"> <img loading="eager" width="499" height="294" src="/files/styles/multiple_ct_header_phone/public/blog/images/2020/SiddleBadaine_main_v1.jpg?itok=_Kvub3b9" alt="Aida Badiane (left) and Katie Siddle (right)" title="Aida Badiane (left) and Katie Siddle (right)" typeof="foaf:Image"> </picture> </div> <div class="media-caption"> <div class="media-caption__credit"> Credit: Scott Sassone </div> <div class="media-caption__description"> Aida Badiane (left) and Katie Siddle (right) </div> </div> </article> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div class="content-section content-section_with-sidebars container"> <div class="row"> <div class="content-section__left col-2"> <div class="block block-better-social-sharing-buttons block-social-sharing-buttons-block"> <div style="display: none"><link rel="preload" href="/modules/contrib/better_social_sharing_buttons/assets/dist/sprites/social-icons--no-color.svg" as="image" type="image/svg+xml" crossorigin="anonymous"></div> <div class="social-sharing-buttons"> <a href="https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=/taxonomy/term/1906/feed&amp;title=" target="_blank" title="Share to Facebook" aria-label="Share to Facebook" class="social-sharing-buttons-button share-facebook" rel="noopener"> <svg aria-hidden="true" width="32px" height="32px" style="border-radius:100%;"> <use href="/modules/contrib/better_social_sharing_buttons/assets/dist/sprites/social-icons--no-color.svg#facebook" /> </svg> </a> <a href="https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=+/taxonomy/term/1906/feed" target="_blank" title="Share to X" aria-label="Share to X" class="social-sharing-buttons-button share-x" rel="noopener"> <svg aria-hidden="true" width="32px" height="32px" style="border-radius:100%;"> <use href="/modules/contrib/better_social_sharing_buttons/assets/dist/sprites/social-icons--no-color.svg#x" /> </svg> </a> <a href="mailto:?subject=&amp;body=/taxonomy/term/1906/feed" title="Share to Email" aria-label="Share to Email" class="social-sharing-buttons-button share-email" target="_blank" rel="noopener"> <svg aria-hidden="true" width="32px" height="32px" style="border-radius:100%;"> <use href="/modules/contrib/better_social_sharing_buttons/assets/dist/sprites/social-icons--no-color.svg#email" /> </svg> </a> </div> </div> </div> <div class="content-section__main col-8"> <div class="block block-layout-builder block-field-blocknodeblogbody"> <div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item"><p> For more than two decades, infectious disease researchers at University Cheikh Anta Diop (UCAD) in Dakar, Senegal, the Ó³»­´«Ã½ of MIT and Harvard, and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health have worked together, using genomic technologies, to learn about how malaria parasites spread and how they can be stopped. During that time, there has been a significant decline in the burden of malaria in the West African country. This success is now allowing UCAD and Ó³»­´«Ã½ researchers to study other kinds of pathogens that cause malaria-like illness.</p> <p> Two of those collaborators, Aida Badiane and Katie Siddle, recently sat down with us in a&nbsp;global health edition of a #WhyIScience Q&amp;A to talk about their latest work and the impact of their collaboration on science and public health in Senegal.&nbsp;Their research is part of the <a href="/node/625131">Ó³»­´«Ã½ Global Health Initiative</a>, which aims to use Ó³»­´«Ã½ science and strong partnerships to tackle global health challenges.</p> <p><iframe allow="encrypted-media" allowfullscreen frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/izxZUEDhtzc" width="560"></iframe></p> <p> Badiane is a professor of parasitology and mycology at UCAD who started out doing lab research on malaria drug-resistance and immunology, but in the last year has moved into public health and field research. She is recruiting patients from clinics and communities to participate in studies on how to use genetic data from malaria parasites in their blood to develop and assess strategies for malaria control and elimination in Senegal.&nbsp;</p> <p> Siddle is a postdoc in <a href="https://www.sabetilab.org/" target="_blank">Pardis Sabeti’s lab</a> at the Ó³»­´«Ã½ and Harvard University. She has been working with Badiane and others at UCAD for the last five years to use sequencing and other genomic approaches to understand the epidemiology of infectious diseases beyond malaria, including those typically caused by viruses.&nbsp;</p> <p> <strong>Q: Why has malaria prevalence decreased so much in Senegal?&nbsp;</strong></p> <p> <strong>Badiane</strong>: That has been a result of decades of effort by our country’s National Malaria Control Program (NMCP), including their research and collaboration with scientists in Senegal. Scientists have helped the NMCP assess their strategies, such as introducing bed nets, that have really helped to bring down the number of malaria cases.&nbsp;</p> <p> <strong>Q: Now that there’s so much less malaria, how has that affected your research?</strong></p> <p> <strong>Siddle</strong>: Even though malaria incidence is declining in Senegal, we still have a lot of patients coming in with acute fevers and other symptoms similar to malaria. We’re trying to understand what are the other causes of these diseases. We're using genome sequencing methods to look in an unbiased way in samples from these patients to see if we can detect what may be the cause of this infection.</p> <p> We've been identifying some viruses, like dengue virus, and also some bacterial infections, like <em>Borrelia</em>, as possible causes. We’re hoping that we can build this project out further and study the causes of non-malarial fevers in different demographic and climatic environments across Senegal. We think that the dominant causes of non-malarial fevers will be different in these different areas.&nbsp;</p> <p> <strong>Badiane</strong>: I began my research in malaria, and now I have begun to learn about other pathogens. I hope that this collaboration with the Ó³»­´«Ã½ can be extended to other diseases, so that we can learn as much about them as we have about malaria.</p> <p> <strong>Q: Why is it important to learn about these other pathogens?</strong></p> <p> <strong>Badiane</strong>: I think this will help our clinicians in Senegal to think about other causes of illness&nbsp; beyond malaria, because when the malaria test comes back negative, they tend to just give antibiotics, without knowing what the cause of the fever is. And this is a cause of drug resistance in bacteria. Reducing antibiotic resistance is one of the objectives of our Ministry of Health.</p> <p> <img alt src="/files/news/stories/IMG-20190927-WA0007.jpg" style="width: 100%;"><em>At a health center near Kolda, Senegal, Siddle and Badiane review patient enrollment for malaria drug efficacy studies. Credit:&nbsp;Abdoulaye Tine</em></p> <p> <strong>Q: Another way that scientists at UCAD and the Ó³»­´«Ã½ have been collaborating is through a program that trains scientists in genomic technologies and analysis. What has been the impact of this training?</strong></p> <p> <strong>Siddle</strong>: This training is part of a program called the <a href="http://acegid.org/index.php" target="_blank">African Center&nbsp;of Excellence in Genomics of Infectious Disease</a>, which is funded by the World Bank. Through this program, we have trained lab scientists and bioinformaticians from across West Africa, including Senegal, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Liberia, on genomic sequencing methods and data analysis.&nbsp;</p> <p> One of the biggest changes I've seen from this program is an acceleration in how people are taking those techniques and applying them to new questions. In the beginning, people were&nbsp; mostly just using the techniques in the way that had been taught in the training program.</p> <p> But more recently, students have been taking those techniques and applying them to new questions, and in particular bringing them back to malaria, and applying those same sequencing techniques to now address questions like drug resistance and the genetic diversity of malaria. That's really cool to see: people are taking these techniques and applying them to questions that they're interested in, and thinking beyond applying them to one particular pathogen or problem.</p> <p> <strong>Badiane</strong>: This training is having a huge impact on students, and also for all of us. I and many scientists in my lab have been trained in courses taught by researchers from the Ó³»­´«Ã½ and Harvard, and over the years, the capacity-building and technology transfer have also benefited our labs in Senegal. This has been tremendously helpful for the research at UCAD. We are now well equipped with the latest tools and techniques, such as next-generation sequencing, and we are able to run the technology ourselves.&nbsp;</p> <p> We do face problems with ordering reagents due to the fact that many institutions in Africa do not use these technologies, but we hope that these problems will be solved in the future. Nevertheless, many students are doing their thesis projects entirely within Senegal and this was possible because of the training, technology transfer and support of our partners at the Ó³»­´«Ã½.</p> </div> </div> <div class="block-node-broad-tags block block-layout-builder block-field-blocknodeblogfield-broad-tags"> <div class="block-node-broad-tags__row"> <div class="block-node-broad-tags__title">Tags:</div> <div class="field field--name-field-broad-tags field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden field__items"> <div class="field__item"><a href="/broad-tags/broad-global-health-initiative" hreflang="en">Ó³»­´«Ã½ Global Health Initiative</a></div> <div class="field__item"><a href="/broad-tags/infectious-disease-and-microbiome-0" hreflang="en">Infectious Disease and Microbiome Program</a></div> <div class="field__item"><a href="/broad-tags/viral-genomics" hreflang="en">Viral genomics</a></div> <div class="field__item"><a href="/broad-tags/infectious-disease-and-microbiome" hreflang="en">Infectious Disease and Microbiome</a></div> <div class="field__item"><a href="/broad-tags/pardis-sabeti" hreflang="en">Pardis Sabeti</a></div> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div class="content-section__right col-2"> <div class="block block-ctools block-entity-viewnode"> <article about="/blog/whyiscience-qa-how-global-collaboration-boosting-science-and-public-health-senegal" class="node node--type-blog node--promoted node--view-mode-sidebar"> <div class="node__content"> <div class="sidebar-group"> <div class="sidebar-group__content"> <div class="block block-layout-builder block-field-blocknodeblogfield-blog-extra-info"> <div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-field-blog-extra-info field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field__item"><h2> RELATED PROGRAMS</h2> <p> <a href="/node/8543/">Infectious Disease and Microbiome</a></p> <p> &nbsp;</p> <p> &nbsp;</p> <h2> RELATED NEWS</h2> <p> <img alt src="/files/news/stories/viral_fishing.jpg" style="width: 212px; height: 158px;"></p> <p> <a href="/node/454526/">New disease surveillance tool helps detect any human virus</a></p> <p> &nbsp;</p> <p> <img alt src="/files/news/stories/Sebeti-lab-paper.jpg" style="width: 212px; height: 158px;"></p> <p> <a href="/node/377281/">Rapid genomic sequencing of Lassa virus in Nigeria enabled real-time response to 2018 outbreak</a></p> <p> &nbsp;</p> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </article> </div> </div> </div> </div> Tue, 08 Oct 2019 10:00:09 +0000 admin 622501 at /news/research-roundup-february-15-2019 <span class="field field--name-title field--type-string field--label-hidden"><h1>#WhyIScience Q&amp;A: How a global collaboration is boosting science and public health in Senegal</h1> </span> <span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"> <span>By Corie Lok</span> </span> <span class="field field--name-created field--type-created field--label-hidden"><time datetime="2020-01-16T10:12:08-05:00" class="datetime">January 16, 2020</time> </span> <div class="hero-section container"> <div class="hero-section__row row"> <div class="hero-section__content hero-section__content_left col-6"> <div class="hero-section__breadcrumbs"> <div class="block block-system block-system-breadcrumb-block"> <nav class="breadcrumb" role="navigation" aria-labelledby="system-breadcrumb"> <h2 id="system-breadcrumb" class="visually-hidden">Breadcrumb</h2> <ol> <li> <a href="/">Home</a> </li> <li> <a href="/news">News</a> </li> </ol> </nav> </div> </div> <div class="hero-section__title"> <div class="block block-layout-builder block-field-blocknodeblogtitle"> <span class="field field--name-title field--type-string field--label-hidden"><h1>#WhyIScience Q&amp;A: How a global collaboration is boosting science and public health in Senegal</h1> </span> </div> </div> <div class="hero-section__description"> <div class="block block-layout-builder block-field-blocknodeblogbody"> <div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item"> <p>Aida Badiane and Katie Siddle talk about their work on malaria and other fever-causing pathogens and the changes they’ve seen in public health and research in the West African country.</p> </div> </div> </div> <div class="hero-section__author"> <div class="block block-layout-builder block-field-blocknodebloguid"> <span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"> <span>By Corie Lok</span> </span> </div> </div> <div class="hero-section__date"> <div class="block block-layout-builder block-field-blocknodeblogcreated"> <span class="field field--name-created field--type-created field--label-hidden"><time datetime="2020-01-16T10:12:08-05:00" class="datetime">January 16, 2020</time> </span> </div> </div> </div> <div class="hero-section__right col-6"> <div class="hero-section__image"> <div class="block block-layout-builder block-field-blocknodeblogfield-image"> <div class="field field--name-field-image field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden field__item"> <article class="media media--type-image media--view-mode-multiple-content-types-header"> <div class="field field--name-field-media-image field--type-image field--label-hidden field__item"> <picture> <source srcset="/files/styles/multiple_ct_header_desktop_xl/public/blog/images/2020/SiddleBadaine_main_v1.jpg?itok=6NaU94W_ 1x" media="all and (min-width: 1921px)" type="image/jpeg" width="754" height="503"> <source srcset="/files/styles/multiple_ct_header_desktop_xl/public/blog/images/2020/SiddleBadaine_main_v1.jpg?itok=6NaU94W_ 1x" media="all and (min-width: 1601px) and (max-width: 1920px)" type="image/jpeg" width="754" height="503"> <source srcset="/files/styles/multiple_ct_header_desktop/public/blog/images/2020/SiddleBadaine_main_v1.jpg?itok=ui9aOmGO 1x" media="all and (min-width: 1340px) and (max-width: 1600px)" type="image/jpeg" width="736" height="520"> <source srcset="/files/styles/multiple_ct_header_laptop/public/blog/images/2020/SiddleBadaine_main_v1.jpg?itok=VL4wYbxq 1x" media="all and (min-width: 800px) and (max-width: 1339px)" type="image/jpeg" width="641" height="451"> <source srcset="/files/styles/multiple_ct_header_tablet/public/blog/images/2020/SiddleBadaine_main_v1.jpg?itok=qFQ5TeIE 1x" media="all and (min-width: 540px) and (max-width: 799px)" type="image/jpeg" width="706" height="417"> <source srcset="/files/styles/multiple_ct_header_phone/public/blog/images/2020/SiddleBadaine_main_v1.jpg?itok=_Kvub3b9 1x" media="all and (max-width: 539px)" type="image/jpeg" width="499" height="294"> <img loading="eager" width="499" height="294" src="/files/styles/multiple_ct_header_phone/public/blog/images/2020/SiddleBadaine_main_v1.jpg?itok=_Kvub3b9" alt="Aida Badiane (left) and Katie Siddle (right)" title="Aida Badiane (left) and Katie Siddle (right)" typeof="foaf:Image"> </picture> </div> <div class="media-caption"> <div class="media-caption__credit"> Credit: Scott Sassone </div> <div class="media-caption__description"> Aida Badiane (left) and Katie Siddle (right) </div> </div> </article> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div class="content-section content-section_with-sidebars container"> <div class="row"> <div class="content-section__left col-2"> <div class="block block-better-social-sharing-buttons block-social-sharing-buttons-block"> <div style="display: none"><link rel="preload" href="/modules/contrib/better_social_sharing_buttons/assets/dist/sprites/social-icons--no-color.svg" as="image" type="image/svg+xml" crossorigin="anonymous"></div> <div class="social-sharing-buttons"> <a href="https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=/taxonomy/term/1906/feed&amp;title=" target="_blank" title="Share to Facebook" aria-label="Share to Facebook" class="social-sharing-buttons-button share-facebook" rel="noopener"> <svg aria-hidden="true" width="32px" height="32px" style="border-radius:100%;"> <use 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class="block block-layout-builder block-field-blocknodeblogbody"> <div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item"><p> For more than two decades, infectious disease researchers at University Cheikh Anta Diop (UCAD) in Dakar, Senegal, the Ó³»­´«Ã½ of MIT and Harvard, and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health have worked together, using genomic technologies, to learn about how malaria parasites spread and how they can be stopped. During that time, there has been a significant decline in the burden of malaria in the West African country. This success is now allowing UCAD and Ó³»­´«Ã½ researchers to study other kinds of pathogens that cause malaria-like illness.</p> <p> Two of those collaborators, Aida Badiane and Katie Siddle, recently sat down with us in a&nbsp;global health edition of a #WhyIScience Q&amp;A to talk about their latest work and the impact of their collaboration on science and public health in Senegal.&nbsp;Their research is part of the <a href="/node/625131">Ó³»­´«Ã½ Global Health Initiative</a>, which aims to use Ó³»­´«Ã½ science and strong partnerships to tackle global health challenges.</p> <p><iframe allow="encrypted-media" allowfullscreen frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/izxZUEDhtzc" width="560"></iframe></p> <p> Badiane is a professor of parasitology and mycology at UCAD who started out doing lab research on malaria drug-resistance and immunology, but in the last year has moved into public health and field research. She is recruiting patients from clinics and communities to participate in studies on how to use genetic data from malaria parasites in their blood to develop and assess strategies for malaria control and elimination in Senegal.&nbsp;</p> <p> Siddle is a postdoc in <a href="https://www.sabetilab.org/" target="_blank">Pardis Sabeti’s lab</a> at the Ó³»­´«Ã½ and Harvard University. She has been working with Badiane and others at UCAD for the last five years to use sequencing and other genomic approaches to understand the epidemiology of infectious diseases beyond malaria, including those typically caused by viruses.&nbsp;</p> <p> <strong>Q: Why has malaria prevalence decreased so much in Senegal?&nbsp;</strong></p> <p> <strong>Badiane</strong>: That has been a result of decades of effort by our country’s National Malaria Control Program (NMCP), including their research and collaboration with scientists in Senegal. Scientists have helped the NMCP assess their strategies, such as introducing bed nets, that have really helped to bring down the number of malaria cases.&nbsp;</p> <p> <strong>Q: Now that there’s so much less malaria, how has that affected your research?</strong></p> <p> <strong>Siddle</strong>: Even though malaria incidence is declining in Senegal, we still have a lot of patients coming in with acute fevers and other symptoms similar to malaria. We’re trying to understand what are the other causes of these diseases. We're using genome sequencing methods to look in an unbiased way in samples from these patients to see if we can detect what may be the cause of this infection.</p> <p> We've been identifying some viruses, like dengue virus, and also some bacterial infections, like <em>Borrelia</em>, as possible causes. We’re hoping that we can build this project out further and study the causes of non-malarial fevers in different demographic and climatic environments across Senegal. We think that the dominant causes of non-malarial fevers will be different in these different areas.&nbsp;</p> <p> <strong>Badiane</strong>: I began my research in malaria, and now I have begun to learn about other pathogens. I hope that this collaboration with the Ó³»­´«Ã½ can be extended to other diseases, so that we can learn as much about them as we have about malaria.</p> <p> <strong>Q: Why is it important to learn about these other pathogens?</strong></p> <p> <strong>Badiane</strong>: I think this will help our clinicians in Senegal to think about other causes of illness&nbsp; beyond malaria, because when the malaria test comes back negative, they tend to just give antibiotics, without knowing what the cause of the fever is. And this is a cause of drug resistance in bacteria. Reducing antibiotic resistance is one of the objectives of our Ministry of Health.</p> <p> <img alt src="/files/news/stories/IMG-20190927-WA0007.jpg" style="width: 100%;"><em>At a health center near Kolda, Senegal, Siddle and Badiane review patient enrollment for malaria drug efficacy studies. Credit:&nbsp;Abdoulaye Tine</em></p> <p> <strong>Q: Another way that scientists at UCAD and the Ó³»­´«Ã½ have been collaborating is through a program that trains scientists in genomic technologies and analysis. What has been the impact of this training?</strong></p> <p> <strong>Siddle</strong>: This training is part of a program called the <a href="http://acegid.org/index.php" target="_blank">African Center&nbsp;of Excellence in Genomics of Infectious Disease</a>, which is funded by the World Bank. Through this program, we have trained lab scientists and bioinformaticians from across West Africa, including Senegal, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Liberia, on genomic sequencing methods and data analysis.&nbsp;</p> <p> One of the biggest changes I've seen from this program is an acceleration in how people are taking those techniques and applying them to new questions. In the beginning, people were&nbsp; mostly just using the techniques in the way that had been taught in the training program.</p> <p> But more recently, students have been taking those techniques and applying them to new questions, and in particular bringing them back to malaria, and applying those same sequencing techniques to now address questions like drug resistance and the genetic diversity of malaria. That's really cool to see: people are taking these techniques and applying them to questions that they're interested in, and thinking beyond applying them to one particular pathogen or problem.</p> <p> <strong>Badiane</strong>: This training is having a huge impact on students, and also for all of us. I and many scientists in my lab have been trained in courses taught by researchers from the Ó³»­´«Ã½ and Harvard, and over the years, the capacity-building and technology transfer have also benefited our labs in Senegal. This has been tremendously helpful for the research at UCAD. We are now well equipped with the latest tools and techniques, such as next-generation sequencing, and we are able to run the technology ourselves.&nbsp;</p> <p> We do face problems with ordering reagents due to the fact that many institutions in Africa do not use these technologies, but we hope that these problems will be solved in the future. Nevertheless, many students are doing their thesis projects entirely within Senegal and this was possible because of the training, technology transfer and support of our partners at the Ó³»­´«Ã½.</p> </div> </div> <div class="block-node-broad-tags block block-layout-builder block-field-blocknodeblogfield-broad-tags"> <div class="block-node-broad-tags__row"> <div class="block-node-broad-tags__title">Tags:</div> <div class="field field--name-field-broad-tags field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden field__items"> <div class="field__item"><a href="/broad-tags/broad-global-health-initiative" hreflang="en">Ó³»­´«Ã½ Global Health Initiative</a></div> <div class="field__item"><a href="/broad-tags/infectious-disease-and-microbiome-0" hreflang="en">Infectious Disease and Microbiome Program</a></div> <div class="field__item"><a href="/broad-tags/viral-genomics" hreflang="en">Viral genomics</a></div> <div class="field__item"><a href="/broad-tags/infectious-disease-and-microbiome" hreflang="en">Infectious Disease and Microbiome</a></div> <div class="field__item"><a href="/broad-tags/pardis-sabeti" hreflang="en">Pardis Sabeti</a></div> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div class="content-section__right col-2"> <div class="block block-ctools block-entity-viewnode"> <article about="/blog/whyiscience-qa-how-global-collaboration-boosting-science-and-public-health-senegal" class="node node--type-blog node--promoted node--view-mode-sidebar"> <div class="node__content"> <div class="sidebar-group"> <div class="sidebar-group__content"> <div class="block block-layout-builder block-field-blocknodeblogfield-blog-extra-info"> <div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-field-blog-extra-info field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field__item"><h2> RELATED PROGRAMS</h2> <p> <a href="/node/8543/">Infectious Disease and Microbiome</a></p> <p> &nbsp;</p> <p> &nbsp;</p> <h2> RELATED NEWS</h2> <p> <img alt src="/files/news/stories/viral_fishing.jpg" style="width: 212px; height: 158px;"></p> <p> <a href="/node/454526/">New disease surveillance tool helps detect any human virus</a></p> <p> &nbsp;</p> <p> <img alt src="/files/news/stories/Sebeti-lab-paper.jpg" style="width: 212px; height: 158px;"></p> <p> <a href="/node/377281/">Rapid genomic sequencing of Lassa virus in Nigeria enabled real-time response to 2018 outbreak</a></p> <p> &nbsp;</p> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </article> </div> </div> </div> </div> Fri, 15 Feb 2019 16:16:09 +0000 tulrich@broadinstitute.org 461661 at