Perceived gap Examples, comments, and proposals
Skills training, hands-on experience and certification Post-graduate training programs e.g., a Masters in Pharmacometrics. These will need contextualization to Africa-Uganda healthcare needs and should use a combination of available and affordable state-of-the-art distance learning pedagogy as popularized by Coursera (https://www.coursera.org/) and traditional classroom teaching.
Accessibility of high-quality, locally generated datasets via online repositories and collections Adoption of standards to support best practices in making data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR)
Clinical trials capacity Increasing academic-industry collaboration to enable earlier phase clinical trials in diseases affecting African populations
Infrastructure and environment
Develop an accessible network of peers and mentors for scientific collaboration including soft skills, mentorship, coaching etc. Provide access to high-speed computing clusters with relevant software for data analysis and simulation including software, hardware, bandwidth etc.
Advocacy and translation to benefit healthcare Funding agencies should recognize the high benefit vs. smaller relative investment inherent in pharmacometrics research vs. the laboratory-based sciences. The need for us to advocate, educate and empower. This should ultimately translate into national and local treatment guidelines, algorithms, and standards of care.
Stronger Industry partnerships most especially in PBPK
The priority of PBPK research, of industry investment for earlier phase trials and internships that could be in both directions. Adoption of standards for the transparent reporting and data sharing from existing work and where such standards might not exist, to define them