Final Publishable Summary Report. Executive summary (not exceeding 1 page). The Consortium for Health Policy and Systems Analysis in Africa (CHEPSAA) worked from 2011- 2015 to increase sustainable African capacity to produce and use health policy and systems research and analysis (HPSR+A). CHEPSAA was a partnership between 7 African and 4 European universities that impacted on African capacity in HPSR+A, and the field of HPSR+A in general, in the following key ways: • It produced new knowledge on the capacity development needs and assets of HPSR+A in Africa through assessments in African partner countries and developed tools for future such assessments; • Through publications, meetings and networking, it helped to build the profile of HPSR+A - internationally, regionally and with policy makers and other educators in the countries and organisations of the CHEPSAA partners; • It has supported each CHEPSAA partner organisation’s development in terms of the number and skills of individuals engaged in HPSR+A as well as more broadly, their: HPSR+A teaching programmes; curriculum development awareness; profile within their own universities, as well as regionally and internationally; networks and engagement nationally, and internationally; • It contributed to developing a new generation of HPSR+A scholars and educators, especially through the CHEPSAA Emerging Leaders Programme. This programme included 26 participants from Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania and South Africa and sought to build a wide range of capacities, ranging from inter-personal to knowledge about the functioning of health systems and approaches to researching health systems. These Emerging Leaders self-report they are likely to continue to work in the field and are better equipped to do research and to teach HPSR+A; • It changed the landscape of HPSR+A teaching by developing and publishing two open access courses, which anyone can access, use and adapt: Introduction to Complex Health Systems and Introduction to Health Policy Systems and Research. Together with an existing course on Introduction to Health Policy Analysis, these courses are already being used in the postgraduate teaching of the CHEPSAA partners, influencing current and future generations of HPSR+A professionals, and have been downloaded from more than 40 countries around the world; • CHEPSAA also built skills in teaching and curriculum design which have been shared more widely within country-level networks, and which can now be applied to strengthen HPSR+A teaching ...
Final Publishable Summary Report. Executive Summary Food allergy (FA) is a chronic, potentially life-threatening (anaphylactic shock) disease with a great impact on the quality of life of patients. To date there are no registered therapies to treat FA, leaving avoidance as the only option. In case of accidental exposure, rescue medication may be used. An effective and above all safe treatment is urgently needed. Therefore, many clinical trial programs, both investigator- and company-driven, are ongoing to develop FA immunotherapy. The first attempt dates back to the early 90s, but subcutaneous injection of aqueous peanut extract proved to be far too unsafe. Since then, focus was on developing immunotherapy via other routes generally regarded to be safer: oral, sublingual and epicutaneous. Most efforts are focused at peanut and to a lesser extent milk and egg allergy and all approaches aim to induce tolerance to the implicated food. In these approaches, foods are administered in their native allergenic form, solid (oral immunotherapy) or extracted (sublingual and epicutaneous) and consequently allergic side-effects during administration are inevitable. In case of oral immunotherapy the side-effects are frequent and often quite severe while sublingual and epicutaneous administration are quite well tolerated. Efficacy of oral immunotherapy is good but is lost in the vast majority of patients as soon as they stop therapy. The effect size of the better tolerated sublingual and epicutaneous approaches is much smaller. The problem of FA immunotherapy is finding the most appropriate route with the right balance between efficacy (high dose needed) and safety (low dose preferred). From treatment of hay fever and allergic asthma we know that the subcutaneous route is very effective, but these use native extracts that were too unsafe for application in FA. Therefore, to apply the effective subcutaneous route for FA safely, the FAST project set out to develop hypo-allergenic immunotherapy vaccines for the treatment fish and fruit allergy. Biotechnology was used to modify the major allergens of fish (parvalbumin) and fruit (lipid transfer protein, LTP) into hypo-allergenic safe vaccines. For the LTP, the project did not succeed to produce a suitable vaccine candidate in time for executing clinical trials during the project. Although 12 molecules were developed and tested extensively and two candidates actually show promising results in mouse models, none warranted GMP production, toxicity testing and cl...
Final Publishable Summary Report
