Dr Glwadys Cheteug from CRID revising the SOPs with Rev. Sister Tata Relindis, matron of the St Joseph’s clinic
The EMERGENTS-ICEMR project focuses research in Nigeria and Cameroon through successful, well-established collaborations, unique advanced research, training infrastructures and an extensive Social Security Administration (SSA) research network to address emerging and challenging issues in malaria transmission using genomics and translational systems biology to better understand the dynamics of malaria transmission in West and Central Africa.
The West-Central Africa EMERGENTS project is an ICEMR program established thanks to a $3.6 million funding from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The project is led by Prof. Rhoel Dinglasan from the University of Florida (USA), in collaboration with Prof. Christian Happi, from the Institute of Genomics and Global Health (IGH) in Nigeria, and Prof. Charles Wondji from CRID in Cameroon.
The EMERGENTS ICEMR (International Centers of Excellence for Malaria Research) project aims to tackle three major knowledge gaps and emerging obstacles to achieving malaria elimination and eradication. These are: Expansion of Non-falciparum malaria; Expansion of the geographic range of Anopheles stephensi; Insecticide resistance (IR) of “primary” and “secondary” mosquito vectors, proposing three interwoven programmatic packages (PP):
- Genomic Epidemiological Mapping of non-falciparum malaria (NFM) – Plasmodium vivax, Plasmodium ovale, and Plasmodium malariae – to quantify the parasite reservoir, measure transmissibility to mosquitoes and evaluate the insecticide resistance status of mosquitoes with NFM parasite infections;
- Bionomics, Ecology, & Control of Anopheles stephensi (BECA) against the background of endemic primary and secondary anopheline vectors;
- Advancing Clinical and Entomological Surveillance (ACES) through emergent diagnostic and translational systems biology platforms to address emerging issues that I to say asymptomatic malaria and non-falciparum malaria transmission in the context of Malaria Elimination and Eradication.
Launched at CRID in April 2024, the EMERGENTS-ICEMR program will run till 2028. It is led by Prof. Charles Wondji, PrincipaI Investigator, assisted by: Dr Emmanuel Elanga-Ndille and Dr Basile Kamgang, Co-Investigators; Dr Glwadys Cheteug and Dr Daniel Nguiffo, Postdoctoral research assistants; Eric Ndumu, PhD student, and Sidney Tche, Project Manager.
