It Takes a Village... and a Clinic

This collaborative effort brings an important weapon to the fight against HIV/AIDS in Africa by Steven Labkoff, M.D., Pfizer

What does success look like to you? To me, it looks like a person with AIDS who is surpassing his three-year life expectancy by three, four, five years or more. It looks like teams of well-trained doctors taking preventative measures by delivering the best medicines to patients who can’t get to help. And it looks like scientists conducting advanced research in a state-of-the-art facility to further refine clinical care and medical training.

Picture those successes and others happening right now in Uganda as a full-scale attack is launched against AIDS – the region’s biggest health threat that currently infects 27 million people in sub-Saharan Africa.

This October, the first large-scale, fully modern clinic, laboratory and medical training center in sub-Saharan Africa officially opened its doors for the treatment and prevention of HIV/AIDS. It is located on the campus of Makerere University School of Medicine in Kampala, Uganda. Its mission: improve the quality of medical care by treating HIV/AIDS patients, teaching prevention and conducting ongoing research.

Until now, only a small number of patients with HIV/AIDS were even seen by doctors in the region. The center's goal is to greatly increase that number – to treat some 4,000-7,000 patients in a year. Ten or 12 exam rooms and a day treatment facility will house these patients, while 100 to 150 on-site workers, including about a dozen physicians, will take care of them.

But the clinic doesn't just treat patients. One of the first orders of business is training doctors. In fact, more than 150 doctors have already been trained – even before the clinic doors opened. This training is vital, because every doctor that we train then goes back into the community to treat patients that can’t get to the clinic, extending the reach of the clinic and giving the overall project much greater penetration all over the continent.

Before now, African medical workers have had to travel to the United States or Europe for special HIV/AIDS training. The new center will allow them to remain in Africa and serve as influential teachers and activists in the fight against AIDS.

Our third goal is to conduct clinical and epidemiological research so that we may advance our other core missions more effectively. And that work, which includes DNA research on the virus, will be conducted in what is now the most sophisticated such laboratory in sub-Saharan Africa.

The project got its start in 2001, begun by a group of prominent physicians and scientists that formed the Academic Alliance for AIDS Care and Prevention in Africa. One of the amazing things about this project is the combination of effort, particularly of the Academic Alliance, the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and Pfizer. Without the cooperation and collaboration of these organizations, as well as other partners and sponsors like SAS, this project could not have happened.

In addition to contributing the initial funding for the facility, which was more than $12 million, Pfizer has been donating both products and people to the cause. As part of this philanthropy effort, Pfizer has donated Diflucan – an antifungal drug that treats cryptococcal meningitis, an AIDS-defining illness – to countries around the world that need the drug and are able to dispense it. That was one of Pfizer's interests here: to help build the infrastructure to support the dissemination of these drugs.

As for people, for example, much of my time over the last few years has been donated to this project. Other Pfizer employees, including construction engineers, computer analysts and business people too, have played an important role in the planning and actual building of the clinic.

And now Pfizer is preparing to send Twaha Bukenya to the Uganda clinic for several months as a fellow in our Global Health Fellows program. Through this program, Pfizer makes our greatest resource – our highly talented, committed and trained people – available to support organizations that are actively addressing the health needs of people in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America. Pfizer currently has 25 fellows in the field, working to help fight infectious disease and build local healthcare capacity in developing countries.

Perfect for this particular assignment, Bukenya is from Uganda and has been living in the United States for more than a decade. But, more importantly, as director of Statistical Analysis and Reporting for Pfizer Development Operations, he has some very interesting skills that are needed at this particular juncture. Namely, Bukenya is a biostatistician whose skills can help get the clinic up and running. To keep the clinic sustainable in the long term, it must produce, research and publish papers. To meet that goal, the clinic needs to be able to digest and analyze data. To do that, we need SAS. To implement SAS in a meaningful way, we need a biostatistician who is trained in SAS. That is where Bukenya fits in.

And that’s where SAS comes into play. Like Cisco, HP, Microsoft and Documentum, SAS is one of several technology companies that donated products and services. Even though I'm not a SAS guru myself, I fully recognize that SAS is a leader in statistical analysis.

So as Bukenya embarks on his journey to Uganda to set up the infrastructure needed to conduct meaningful research into the AIDS virus, he goes with the well wishes of too many individuals to count. But, really, I think the biggest and most tangible metric is the years added to the lives of so many patients.