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Professor John Kaldor will lead the ENGAGE Centre for Research Excellence, aimed at accelerating progress towards the elimination of these often deadly diseases.

The Kirby Institute at UNSW Sydney has been awarded a $3 million Centres of Research Excellence (CRE) grant through the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) to help control and eliminate neglected tropical diseases in Australia and the Asia-Pacific region.

Scientia Professor John Kaldor – Head of the Global Health Program at the Kirby Institute – will lead a team awarded $3 million over five years, comprising investigators from health research and service organisations in Australia and the Asia-Pacific region. The grant will fund a new CRE called ENGAGE: Ending the Neglect through Greater Access and Greater Effectiveness, which will work on accelerating progress towards the public health control and elimination of neglected tropical diseases (NTDs).

NTDs are a diverse group of 20 health conditions, strongly linked to environmental factors, that largely affect people with poor access to health services. In our region, NTDs include intestinal worm-related diseases, the skin diseases scabies and yaw, the blinding disease trachoma and the mosquito-borne diseases lymphatic filariasis and dengue. The World Health Organization says NTDs affect more than 1 billion people worldwide.

“Neglected tropical diseases have devastating health, social and economic consequences, particularly for populations in remote and low-income settings,” Scientia Prof. Kaldor said.

“By the end of our five years of funding, we anticipate ENGAGE will have provided partner countries and their communities, and our region more broadly, with crucial new knowledge on how to track, prevent and control endemic NTDs. Our team of investigators from health organisations in Australia and the Pacific and Southeast Asia bring the wealth of experience needed to confront these preventable causes of human suffering.” 

Other Kirby Institute investigators on the project include Professor Susana Vaz Nery, Professor Virginia Wiseman and Dr Lucia Romani. They are joined by colleagues from Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, Telethon Kids Institute, Burnet Institute, the National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation, University of Queensland, James Cook University, the QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute, Monash University, University of the Philippines, Papua New Guinea Institute for Medical Research, Menzies School of Health Research at Charles Darwin University, University of Melbourne, Curtin University, Ministry of Health (Fiji) and Ministry of Health (Solomon Islands).

The Director of the Kirby Institute, Scientia Professor Anthony Kelleher, said the funding was a fantastic achievement and would make a significant difference in working towards WHO’s 2030 targets of eliminating neglected tropical diseases.

“The grant will help to build a NTD research workforce that’s equipped to find better solutions for the control of these major contributors to the burden of infectious disease in our region.”

The CRE scheme provides funding to researchers to undertake collaborative research to improve health outcomes, develop knowledge and potentially impact health policy and/or practice. A total of $60 million has been awarded to 20 new centres to develop research capacity in basic science, clinical medicine and science, health services and public health.