Project summary
EDCTP has launched 65 calls for proposals and awarded 254 grants since its inception. A total of 73 grants (29%) were still active at the end of 2014 and 181 (71%) grants were completed. The total grant value of these 254 projects is €211.98 million, including cofunding via EDCTP.
EDCTP’s project portfolio is relatively well-balanced in terms of number of projects and amount of funding per disease area. So far, tuberculosis research has received the largest share of the funding with a total of €70.68 million (33.3%) for 36 projects, followed by 56 HIV projects (€62.5 million; 29.5%) and 42 malaria projects (€50.69 million; 23.9%), while 3.4% of grant funding (€7.23 million) supported 12 projects on HIV/TB co-infection. Funding for ethics and regulatory activities amounted to €5.02 million (2.4%) to support 78 projects and €15.83 million (7.5%) was the total for 30 projects that supported a range of cross-cutting activities, including the EDCTP Regional Networks of Excellence, capacity building and networking grants.
By end of 2014, 100 clinical trials had received support from EDCTP: 34 trials on malaria, 30 trials on HIV/AIDS, 27 trials on tuberculosis, and 9 trials on HIV/TB co-infections. These trials have tested new and improved drugs for treatment and prevention (59), vaccines (25), diagnostics (11), microbicides (3) and two trials used electronic devices to investigate methods to enhance retention rates in trials and adherence to treatment.
Seventy-three (73) of the 100 clinical trials have finished (two trials were terminated prematurely), with the remainder in the final stages of recruitment or follow-up.
EDCTP has supported the long-term training of 516 African researchers from undergraduate Bachelor’s students to postdoctoral researchers (including 51 Senior Fellows, 172 PhD students and 242 Master’s students). This includes 10 grants awarded in 2014 for Master’s Fellowships in Epidemiology and Medical Statistics, following a call for proposals in 2013 funded by Sweden and UK. Furthermore, the majority of EDCTP grants include short-term training courses and workshops, linked to the overall aims of the project. The EDCTP ethics programme has awarded 75 grants totalling just over €4 million to support the establishment and strengthening of national ethics committees and institutional review boards, as well as training programmes and resources.
Research output
EDCTP’s funding strategy has focused on research addressing key clinical challenges and policy-relevant questions in sub-Saharan Africa, whilst strengthening research capacity and the enabling environment for research in sub-Saharan Africa.
The majority of clinical trials and studies that closed in 2014 were presented at (inter)national conferences and the results were published in high-profile journals. The studies have also produced results that informed national and international policy.
There have been more than 600 publications from EDCTP-funded projects to date. A recent bibliometric analysis showed that the citation impact of EDCTP-funded papers (2003-2011) was high, particularly in the areas of HIV/AIDS and HIV/TB co-infection. This indicates that EDCTP-funded projects delivered high-quality research that has had a major impact on the field