The Global Academic Program, or GAP, is MD Anderson’s international collaboration network. We support relationships all across the world on behalf of our faculty and our students and our postdocs and support their mission-oriented work in research and education, patient care and prevention. We have what we call sister institutions in many parts of the world including in Asia, Latin America, Europe and the Middle East and now we’re also working in Africa. Here we’re more focussed on capacity building and looking also to partner with other institutions and organisations, so some of our primary partners are UICC, the Union for International Cancer Control, and Pink Ribbon Red Ribbon from the Bush Institute. We rely on these partners for guidance and mentorship also, to find good partners in Africa, and also to integrate what we’re doing with what’s already going on.
What’s the endgame of GAP?
GAP was really created, as I said, to support our faculty so our endgame is really the same endgame as that of MD Anderson which is to end cancer. I think we have a ways to go. The advances in cancer are tremendous these days but they’re unevenly distributed, that’s something we always learn when we come here. So I think there’s still much to be done. But the good news is that there’s a lot that can be accomplished today with the knowledge that we have about cancer today by implementing tobacco control programmes, by screening for cervical cancer and vaccinating for HPV, by screening for breast cancer and providing the appropriate surgical and medical and radiological treatments. I think we can accomplish a lot for the people of Africa if we work together.
What form does this collaboration take?
We use all kinds of methodologies to engage with our African partners. We do onsite workshops and we’ve also started developing educational materials in collaboration with partners that are meaningful. We’re helping with some treatment guidelines and we use a methodology called Project ECHO which was developed by the University of New Mexico for liver work actually, liver disease. But it’s really a telementoring methodology and it provides a way to have a sustained engagement with your partners even if they’re geographically distant. We’ve used that even within Texas, within Latin America and now we’re folding in some of our African partners. So this is really a way that our doctors can communicate with doctors at our partner institutions and engage with them and discuss with them cases and approaches and so on.
