PACoPPDeT - Pan-Africa Consortium on Pharmaceutical Product Development Training (PACoPPDeT)

The momentum created by the African local pharmaceutical product manufacturing agenda for sustainable equitable healthcare provision makes the continent the frontier for product development due to the population dividend and disease burden. Local manufacturing will have to be heralded by investment in Research and Development, including cost-competitive technology implementation with associated skills development through a sustained holistic collaboration.

In Africa even countries with a relatively strong clinical trials capability, tend to have their experience with phase II – III clinical product development (www.ctc.africa) but most of the protocol development and subsequent sample and data analysis happens outside the continent due to limited capacity in bioanalytics, statistics and data management. There is an urgent need to develop a critical mass of analytical and basic science skills to support pharmaceutical product development that fall in the sphere of pharmacometrics techniques.

This led to the formation of Pharmacometrics Africa to build pharmacometrics capacity and associated skills covering product development value chain. The proposed Masters programme at Strathmore University, Kenya, will fill the capacity gap by equipping the fellows with knowledge on pharmaceutical product development value chain through “Pan-Africa Consortium on Pharmaceutical Product Development Training (PACoPPDeT)”.

The work packages will cover product discovery, pharmacokinetics & pharmacodynamics, pharmacogenomics, preclinical and clinical evaluation and leadership, delivered as modules. The training programme will be a tripod created by Faculty and fellows, Coursework and the experiential learning. The fellows with diverse backgrounds from the five Africa CDC regions. The faculty team will be a blend of academia, policy, and industry for complementarity. Two cohorts of 15 Masters fellows each will be supported and 100 persons certified courses on short courses.

Swiss TPH will lead the clinical trials track (trial design, conduct and management, data management, report compilation, NDA submission to regulators) in the 24 month Pharmaceutical Product Development Master’s programme.