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Collaboration to on Millennium Villages Project
Press release22 March 2007 FIND and Columbia University’s Earth Institute to collaborate on Millennium Villages Project
Credit: Todd Sheridan
From left to right (seated): Dr. Giorgio Roscigno, FIND Chief Executive
Officer and Earth Institute Director Jeffrey Sachs. (standing): Vinand Nantulya,
FIND Senior and Policy Implementation Officer, Joanna Rubinstein, Director Global
Health Initiative (Columbia University), Yanis Ben Amor, Tuberculosis Coordinator,
Millennium Villages Project (Earth Institute).
New York, U.S.A., 22 March 2007 -- The Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND)
signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU)effective as of today with The Earth Institute
at Columbia University in New York, to introduce, as part of a research project, new tools for diagnosis
of tuberculosis (TB) in low-resource settings identified by the
Millennium Villages project. The MOU was signed
jointly by Dr. Giorgio Roscigno, FIND Chief
Executive Officer (CEO), and Earth Institute
Director Jeffrey Sachs during a ceremony held at
Columbia University. The Millennium Villages are
based on a “bottom up” approach to lifting some
of the poorest communities out of the poverty
trap that afflicts more than a billion people
worldwide. Started in 2004, the Millennium
Villages now works in 79 villages in 10 African
countries. The Millennium Villages work to
empower African villages to achieve the
Millennium Development Goals—eight objectives
for accelerating the fight against hunger,
disease, environmental degradation and
inequality--through the development of
sustainable strategies and cost-effective
solutions in several critical areas, including
agriculture, health, education, water and
energy, in sub-Saharan Africa.
Established in 2003, FIND is a leading public-private partnership in the area of diagnostics whose key objective is to contribute to improved global health through the development and introduction of better diagnostic technologies for poverty-related diseases in developing countries. FIND’s disease portfolio currently includes TB, human African trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness), and malaria. This collaboration will enable FIND and the Earth Institute to test the viability of various new diagnostic tools for TB developed by FIND—as opposed to the still widely used century-old microscopy—at the district level or in rural health facilities notably in Africa. When patients are infected with TB or are co-infected with HIV, microscopy is inadequate and significantly less sensitive. The studies should also enable the introduction into national disease control programs and facilitate the selection of the most efficient and appropriate technologies. For these projects, FIND will first provide technical guidance to the Ministries of Health in each selected country for the investigation under field condition of two to three diagnostic tests. FIND will later supply additional tests that are currently at the research and development stage and which are specifically designed for rapid and easy use at the village clinic level. “We are excited about this collaboration with the Earth Institute and look forward to contributing to the successful achievement of the Millennium Development Goals,” said FIND Chief Executive Officer, Dr. Giorgio Roscigno. “Facilitating access to and providing more efficient and affordable diagnostic tools in developing countries is an essential path to follow if one wants to better fight poverty-related diseases such as TB.” Earth Institute Director Jeffrey Sachs praised the new partnership for “creating an invaluable framework for testing.” “If successful, the partnership will also help scale up powerful new diagnostic tools that are needed with great urgency. The Millennium Villages provide an ideal setting for scientific validation of important diagnostic tools, where the new candidates will be studied alongside the use of existing best-option technologies,” said Sachs. Areas of collaboration will not only include investigating the impact of new diagnostic tests for TB on poverty reduction; but also producing relevant data on the efficiency of the new diagnostic tools in the MVP. These studies will take into consideration the ethnic, cultural, epidemiological (high or low HIV, high or low MDR-TB) diversity of several African countries, as well as the variability in resources allocated to fight TB. “Validating a new diagnostic tool to replace microscopy is crucial for effective TB control worldwide,” said Dr. Yanis Ben Amor, TB Coordinator for the Millennium Villages. “In the era of multidrug-resistant TB and extensively drug-resistant TB, it is becoming increasingly more vital not only to accurately identify TB patients but also to rapidly determine their drug resistance profile. The tests under scrutiny at FIND will enable both.” About FIND About the Earth Institute Media inquiries: Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND) The Earth Institute © Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics 2008. Click here to see the copyright notice |
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