Page 85 - A Widening Idea of Health and Health Research - The South African Medical Research Council from Creation to COVID

A Widening Idea of Health: The SAMRC from Creation to Covid

mindset of the organisation from a purely research organisation to that of a business-
oriented organisation’. This was easier said than done, however, for most MRC
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scientists were still steeped in a traditional ‘research for research’s sake’ culture. They
‘paid merely lip service to the idea of research translation’, grumbled the then head
of the Innovation Centre. Only gradually was this altered, in part in response to the
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pressure of the Government’s 2008 Intellectual Property Rights Act, which required
all MRC researchers to disclose any potential intellectual property developed with
public funds so it could be ‘protected, utilised and commercialized for the benefit of
the people of the Republic’.
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With the MRC itself taking the lead in spotting gaps in the market which it then
sought to fill – the establishment of the Diabetes Discovery Platform in 2009 was
justified in such terms – and also encouraging the invention of medical equipment
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through the joint creation of a Medical Device Innovation Platform in 2010, the pace
of the commercialization of innovative products of its research began to quicken.
Whereas in 2010 the MRC supervised only 2 agreements with intellectual property
rights clauses between its researchers and private companies, in 2012 this figure rose to
25. In exceptional cases (like Jembi Digital Health) a project started within the MRC
was even spun off into a separate company in its own right. The Innovation Centre’s
clever tag, ‘Your invention is our business’, was indeed bearing fruit.
A different type of product which the MRC also sought to make widely accessible
was medical information and the communications technology required to disseminate
it effectively. To this end, in 1999 it combined with the National Department of
Health to develop a telemedicine (and even a telepsychology) system, especially
for those living in rural areas too far away for a face-to-face medical consultation.
Moreover, in subsequent decades it went on to take full advantage of the global
telecommunications revolution to greatly expand this informational footprint by
setting up an e-Health Research and Innovation Platform encompassing the web,
informatics, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. The best example of this innovation
in practice in these years was the AfroAIDSinfo site, which was created in 2002 to
disseminate the latest information about HIV/AIDS to ‘researchers, the health
profession, the public, infected individuals, educators and policy-makers’. ‘It sure is
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packed with information … [and] is worth many visits and many returns’, the South
African Medical Journal judged.
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Also aimed at providing up-to-date information, but in this case in the form of
independent systematic reviews and syntheses of results of recent clinical trials of
treatments for common local disorders, was the MRC’s Cochrane Centre Research
Unit. Hosted and financially assisted by the MRC from 1997, this first-ever African

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