Informatics Training for Global Health (Itgh)

The summary for the Informatics Training for Global Health (Itgh) grant is detailed below. This summary states who is eligible for the grant, how much grant money will be awarded, current and past deadlines, Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance (CFDA) numbers, and a sampling of similar government grants. Verify the accuracy of the data FederalGrants.com provides by visiting the webpage noted in the Link to Full Announcement section or by contacting the appropriate person listed as the Grant Announcement Contact. If any section is incomplete, please visit the website for the National Institutes of Health, which is the U.S. government agency offering this grant.

Informatics Training for Global Health (Itgh): The Fogarty International Center (FIC), in collaboration with the National Library of Medicine (NLM), the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB), and the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), invites applications for the establishment or continuation of training programs in informatics for global health to address the needs of developing country institutions for information technologies and associated sciences to support biomedical research. U.S. institutions, in partnership with developing country institutions that have strong, independent or collaborative, funded medical research programs are eligible to apply with the goal of enhancing and further strengthening those research activities. Applicants are expected to develop innovative training programs for developing country biomedical and behavioral scientists and engineers, clinicians, librarians, and other health professionals that increase their capacity to access, manage, analyze, interpret, manipulate, model, display, and share biomedical information electronically. Programs that include training in data management, biostatistics, biological imaging, disease surveillance, epidemiology, computer modeling, and bioinformatics are particularly encouraged. It is envisioned that developing country institutions participating in the program may eventually serve as regional centers for medical, genome, and global health informatics training. Training programs should be directed toward building informatics capacity in the partner foreign country that can contribute directly to research in disease pathogenesis, prevention, diagnostics, or treatment. Inclusion of countries in the program with particularly severe endemic or epidemic malaria, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, or a growing burden of chronic, non- communicable diseases is encouraged. Institutions carrying out biomedical and behavioral research are usually composed of multiple individual laboratories and departments working on many separate research problems. However, many of these projects have common needs for research expertise and infrastructure. For example, within a single institution, training in information sciences, molecular genetic technologies, and bioethics would each benefit a large number of groups and strengthen the research capacity at the institution overall. Creating a core of expertise in these fields within institutions could serve to "glue" the disparate laboratories into a more efficient and interactive entity. Moreover, experts in any of these fields might choose to collaborate widely with a variety of institutional programs, further strengthening those ties. This RFA is a first step toward realizing the goal of "gluing" outstanding research institutions in developing countries into more cohesive and efficient operational units. Information technology is required in almost all research programs, both to access the vast information resources available internationally and to apply to research design and analysis. This need is even more pressing in the increasingly multidisciplinary and multilaboratory projects in global health, such as the recent human, Anopheles, and Plasmodium genome consortia, or in multi-site clinical trials or international disease surveillance and prevention programs. In these projects, large datasets must be shared between unrelated laboratories, posing significant data management and analysis challenges. In addition, advances in global health may be increasingly driven by new technologies that emerge at the interface of computational and biomedical science. The genomics and proteomics revolutions are stunning examples of such creative collaborations. Finally, there is a need to learn how to archive and retrieve new types of data, such as the enormous amount of information contained within images. For all of these reasons, information technology can be seen as a cornerstone of institutional research capacity. To achieve these goals, applicants should focus on developing a training program in partnership with a single developing country institution that serves as a "center of research excellence" in their region, in the sense that they have active research programs of high quality in a number of areas. The objectives are: (1) To train individuals who will apply state-of-the-art information and communication technologies to research, health surveillance, and other biomedical applications and who will function in their home institutions as trainers or leaders in these technologies; (2) To raise awareness of and access to informatics resources within the larger scientific community at the institution; and (3) To develop a plan to create a sustainable medical and global health informatics training program at the institution. Training plans should be directly integrated with the research activities at the institution. Technologies and skills that are emphasized during training must be directly related to research applications, and capacity-building activities should be substantially focused on skills beyond basic computer operations. Within that context, it is envisioned that trainees will represent a range of skill levels and responsibilities, as relevant to the specific research training and capacity building objectives of the program and the environment of the home institution. This RFA follows an earlier RFA (TW-99-003), International Training in Medical Informatics (ITMI), which focused broadly on building medical informatics capacity in developing countries of sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean. The present RFA represents a further evolution of this program. The geographical focus has been expanded to include any country that meets the World Bank criteria of a low- to middle-income economy (see below). The current focus on foreign institutions with substantial research programs is intended to encourage the integration of medical, genome, and disease informatics training with ongoing research activities to more directly create and more efficiently deploy biomedical and behavioral research informatics capacity for the region. As a critical mass of trainees return to their home institutions, it is envisioned that some of these individuals may in turn become mentors for future trainees, such that a sustainable training program can eventually be developed to serve the larger region.