On February 14 2021, the honourablePrime Minister of Bangladesh Sheikh Hasina laid down the foundation forthe Kumudini International Institute of Medical Science and Cancer Research (KIIMS CaRe) in Narayanganj. While listening to the news clip on TV, the Prime Minister’s emphasis on creating a health research culture in Bangladesh struck me. In recent years, the lack of research culture, infrastructure, skills and resources in higher education institutes in Bangladesh has fuelled debates across academia, media and policy levels. The country’s prestigious universities fail to find their places in regional rankings largely because of the absence of a substantial research portfolio across disciplines. In the global context, research has become a metaphor for life savers as we are living through the Covid-19 global pandemic. Scientists and researchers now get more airtime than entertaininers on traditional media such as TV and radio. People follow social media feeds of credible and often not so credible sources to learn about the recent trends of the virus and its mutation, the numbers of people affected, and of course about the vaccine. If there is one word that binds all these and countless other questions together, it is ‘research’. Within this context, the Prime Minister’s particular emphasis on research in health and medical science in Bangladesh is timely and anticipatory.
But how does research in health/medical science happen? How do medical practitioners, academics, researchers and the general public come together to make a research happen? How is research funded and monitored? And perhaps most important of all: how does health research transform treatment and health quality of a country? These are complex and interrelated questions, and not everything can be answered in a single discussion. For now, I just wantto shed light on the funding aspect of medical research in the UK from my personal/professional point of view. My purpose is not to give any prescription, neither is it to compare countries, but rather to acknowledge that health research is an incredibly complex and dynamic concept, and a lot of background support is necessary to make research happen.
When I worked for my PhD at the University of York (2011-2014), and then subsequently, at the Department of English and Humanities, BRAC University (2015-2018), I was interested in the receiving side of a research grant. It is important to win a research grant to start or continue a research. Researchers hope that one research should pave the way to the following one. However, a shift in my career in 2019 has given me the opportunity to work at the managing side of health/ social care research in the UK. Currently, I work as a Research Programme Manager at the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), England. This position has helped to have an insider’s view of how health and social care research is managed in the UK.
The Oxford AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine research fund was providedto University of Oxford jointly by NIHR and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) on behalf of the Department of Health and Social Care, UK. While researchers can have the expertise, team and skills to conduct a research, funding is crucial in making research happen,although funding alone cannot make research work. It is as important to have a credible body to manage the funding as the funding itself. Professor Sarah Gilbert, the designer of Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine, started working on the roadmap of the Covid 19 vaccine as soon the genetic structure of the virus was published by the scientists in China. But the world would not have received the vaccine in this swiftest possible time, if funding and due monitoring were not available to start the trial. As early as in April 2020 --when Covid 19 was a young pandemic -- NIHR and UKRI jointly called the ‘Joint Rapid Research Response’ with a budget of £20 million. I will not go into too much detail of the administrative side of the Call launch and the subsequent process. Suffice is to say that colleagues across NIHR and UKRI worked tirelessly to make the Call happen. Professor Sarah Gilbert’s proposal was one of the first six projects that the UK government funded in May 2020. The result is now in our hands.
This brings to my final point: health research has many stakeholders. We may have doctors, practitioners, patients, researchers and academics. But the key challenge is to bring them together through a funding body that works at the background as the backbone of research. In Bangladesh we need the backbone. The rest of the body will grow stronger on the backbone.
Rifat Mahbub is Research Programme Manager, National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), UK
