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“I am so excited to be awarded the Anglophone prize for the Young Investigators Award – 2020 by the African Association for Research & Control of Anti-Microbial Resistance (AAAMR),”
reads a statement off Dr Gerald Mboowa’s twitter handle. Mboowa, a bioinformatics scientist at the African Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics & Data Intensive Sciences of the Infectious Diseases Institute, Makerere University, was awarded €10,000 (approximately UGX 44.5M) by the Mali based African Association for research and control of Anti-Microbial Resistance (AAAMR) with funding from Institut Mérieux. This was in recognition of his innovation, the Rapid Microbial Analysis Pipeline (rMAP). rMAP is an automated bioinformatics tool for analyzing, interpreting and tracking antimicrobial resistance (AMR). It is able to exhaustively decode bacterial resistance with minimal hands involvement.
Additionally, this tool is able to perform a number of functions including: downloading raw sequence data from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI)-Sequence Read Archive (SRA); run quality control checks; detect antibiotic resistance using a comprehensive reference database as well as novel antimicrobial resistance genes and virulence factors and create results in standard bioinformatics file formats as well as HTML reports, among others. rMAP is available on GitHub, an online hosting platform for bioinformatics software development.
It is envisioned that the application of this tool for real-time detection of drug resistant pathogens is essential to combat their (resistant pathogens) increasing threat. Globally, drug-resistant infections could cause 10 million deaths each year by 2050. In Africa, AMR has already been documented to be a problem for HIV and the pathogens that cause malaria, tuberculosis, and gonorrhea. Nonetheless, various independent research shows that AMR can be accurately predicted from analyzing a sample of DNA for many bacteria, a process known as genomic sequencing.
However the sequence-based approach to AMR detection requires robust bioinformatics tools to analyze and determine the genomic structure of the drug resistance conferring genes. In this regard, the rMAP is a timely innovation to offer comprehensive profiling of drug resistant bacteria with precision. This tool will undeniably lead to a paradigm shift in the way that scientists conduct AMR surveillance and compare results internationally.
On the other hand, the Young Investigators Award will enable Dr. Mboowa to continue conducting research on AMR. It was presented to him duringa webinar on antimicrobial resistance organized by AAAMR on December 14 2020.
