Page 116 - A Widening Idea of Health and Health Research - The South African Medical Research Council from Creation to COVID

Slimmer, but Not Lacking Gray Matter: The MRC, 2012–2021

Professor Kogie Naidoo, clinical head of the HIV and TB Treatment Research Programme
at CAPRISA, explains the possible side-effects of recommended drugs at the eThekwini
Research Clinic, Durban, 2021.

Only one significant killer not in the top ten was able to gain the MRC’s direct
financial support for research, cancer. This was because Karim, in his revitalizing zeal
to trim the number of intramural research units, had argued that ‘the best cancer
research is done on patients’, and that, since the three existing MRC intramural
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research units devoted to cancer research did not do so, they should be scrapped
and cancer research rather shifted to extramural research units linked to teaching
hospitals. To counter the resultant outcry from local cancer NGOs and advocacy
groups, he had secured R100 million abroad to add to the MRC’s annual government
grant so it could back new extramural research units focusing on cancer. As a result,
by 2019 clinical cancer research centres had been set up at three medical schools with
the MRC’s backing, while at Pretoria University the Precision Prevention and Novel
Drug Targets for HIV-Associated Cancers Research Unit had been created in a bid
to understand the aetiology of cervical and oesophageal cancer better and determine
whether they could be curbed therapeutically.
The other cluster of new research units not directly in the public health domain
was largely laboratory-based. Two focused on making vaccines more effective against

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