Collaborative Research

Desmond Tutu TB Centre

Childhood Tuberculosis (TB) is a growing concern, both in South Africa and beyond; however, we lack good methods for laboratory-based diagnosis of TB in children. Because of the dire risks of allowing unchecked TB infection, particularly in very young children and babies, patients are often treated on the basis of clinical signs, which may or may not result from TB infection.

We are working with the Desmond Tutu TB Centre (DTTC) to support an NIH- funded TB marker validation study, which hopes to improve diagnostics and treatment response monitoring, in particular for childhood TB.

CEPHIA- Consortium for Evaluation and Perfomance of HIV Incidence Assays

With funding from the Gates Foundation, CEPHIA has investigated the potential of currently available technology to characterise recent HIV infection for the purposes of incidence surveillance.

SACEMA has collaborated with the UK Health Protection Agency, the University of California (San Francisco) and the Blood Systems Research Institute, San Francisco, to provide a thorough independent assessment of the available tests for recent infection.

South African COVID-19 Modelling Consortium (SACMC)

The South African COVID-19 Modelling Consortium (SACMC) is a group of researchers from academic, non-profit, and government institutions across South Africa. The group is coordinated by the National Institute for Communicable Diseases, on behalf of the National Department of Health. The mandate of the group is to provide, assess, and validate model projections to be used for planning purposes by the Government of South Africa. The core SACMC modelling team includes SACEMA researchers.