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Enhancing pathogen bioinformatics research capacity in Rwanda Biomedical Centre 

Dr Conor Meehan, School of Science and Technology, NTU

Collaborators: Rwanda Biomedical Centre

Overview

The Rwanda Biomedical Centre (RBC) oversees all public health programmes in Rwanda, including for tuberculosis, HIV, Measles and other pathogens. The staff have extensive expertise in bacterial drug resistance testing and genome sequencing but training in data analysis and bioinformatics is limited due to lack of national capacity.

This project aims to build a foundation in these topics, focussing on whole genome sequence analyses, transmission tracking and project design. The goal is to create a hub of highly trained bioinformaticians in RBC who can then lead on future research projects.

A paper is currently being written on this work, for submission later in the year.

Research Presentations

June 2024:

Research from Rwanda was presented as a poster (P026) in June 2024 at The 44th Annual Congress of the European Society for Mycobacteriology held in Bruges, Belgium.

March 2024:

Dr Conor Meehan also presented similar work as a poster at the AMR big data conferences at the Wellcome Genome Campus.

Poster Presentation: Tracking cross-border transmission of the Rwanda MDR-TB R3 Clone.

Methodological approaches

  • Whole genome sequencing
  • Molecular epidemiology
  • Bioinformatics
  • Virology

Team members