Research focus

Tuberculosis

Relevance and importance to UP, South Africa and Africa

The TB@UP’s strategy aligns with both international and national priority areas. Housed at the University of Pretoria (UP), TB@UP’s strategy aligns with the UP Strategic Plan 2025, “To be a leading research‐intensive university in Africa, recognised internationally for its quality, relevance and impact, as also for developing people, creating knowledge and making a difference locally and globally”. TB@UP’s strategy aligns with various national plans including the Department of Science and Technology, Grand Challenges and Science Missions, the National Research and Development Strategy, the National Development Plan (Vision 2030), the Science, Technology and Innovation Strategy for Africa: 2024, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 3, and the World Health Organization End TB Strategy. Whilst aligning with important policy structures, TB@UP’s research strategy strives to reduce the burden of tuberculosis in South African populations.

TB@UP will harness existing expertise and resources, providing an opportunity to expand UPs research offering. The establishment of the TB@UP infrastructure will also be crucial in enabling the facilitation of innovative research, strengthening existing TB research and providing an extended local infrastructure for training post-graduate students on specialised techniques.  By pulling together the investigative work being done on molecular mycobacteriology and antimicrobial resistance, improved diagnostics of inflammatory markers, studies on transmission dynamics and the impact of controlled environmental interventions on the spread of the disease there is an opportunity to inform management approaches at community level, which will enable the UP to tailor treatments to individual patients and therefore allow us to provide precision treatment of this debilitating disease. The consolidation of the research efforts will provide a translational research platform that extends from the research domain to clinical applications. TB@UP will be the platform to inform the creation and facilitation of large-scale clinical trial capabilities in drug and vaccine development for TB. 

Goals and Objectives

Major Strategic Goals of the TB@UP Research Unit

• Establishing an inter-departmental (including inter-Faculty) collaborative structure that will optimise TB research efforts across academic departments with implication for downstream impact on the control of the epidemic. This UP entity is provisionally called: The TB@UP Research Centre; 
• Defining an UP-SAMRC Research Partnership through the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding on research activities in TB, in particular as it applies to the development of vaccine clinical trial capability and in the creation of state-of-the-art TB laboratory facilities to enable high-quality post-graduate training and specialist scientific research activity.

Objectives

• Focus and provide impetus to quality TB research at the UP, enabling increased outputs of quality research, and empowering young researchers in an enabling environment towards capacity building for the university and the country.

• Increase the profile of the university through a high-quality research programme in TB and related disciplines.

• Make available resources that will attract collaboration of important stakeholders e.g. CSIR, DST and other universities.

• Appoint visiting international experts to give credibility and high visibility to the research efforts.

• Leverage expert appointments to attract significant grant funding for research projects and visiting researchers.

• Make available BSL facilities to NHLS for providing a reference centre function in the areas of multi- and extensively drug resistant TB.