Three case examples of funded GHRI grants
| Investigators | Country | Type of grant | Intervention | Brief description | Implications |
| Case 1: McHenry (USA) Oyungu (Kenya) Kigen (Kenya) | Kenya | Planning Grant | NA | To develop a caregiver curriculum for children with autism, two members of each international team visited the other respective study site (Eldoret or Indiana) to codesign the implementation guide, identify shared needs and ensure two-way translation. | After the behavioural training manual is developed, there are plans to secure funding for demonstration projects and conduct studies across MTRH and low-resourced clinical settings in rural Indiana. |
| Oyungu (Kenya) Chelagat (Kenya) McHenry (USA) | Kenya | Demonstration Grant | Care for Child Development (CCD) Programme | Investigators implemented a pilot study of a group-based, culturally adapted CCD programme of thirty-one children in Kenya and their caregivers. | The CCD programme has potential to be adapted within low-resourced clinical settings in Indiana given its positive preliminary data on maternal depressive symptoms, home environment and caregiver perspectives. |
| Summary: The GHRI-funded programme has followed two caregiver-focused interventions in Kenya that target young children with neurodevelopmental delays, specifically autism spectrum disorder, who are often stigmatised across sub-Saharan Africa. Through the AMPATH collaboration, Kenyan and US-based investigators from Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital (MTRH) and IU collaborated on two culturally adapted, group-based pilot studies for caregivers of children with neurodevelopmental disabilities or autism. The initial group-based pilot at MTRH was funded through the demonstration grant. After demonstrating success, the Indiana CTSI awarded the investigators a planning grant to build partnerships between the Kenyan Ministry of Health, MTRH and Indiana-based collaborators. | |||||
| Case 2: Bucher (USA) Esamai (Kenya) Linnes (USA) | Kenya and Nigeria | Demonstration Grant | Swaddling with automated Monitoring Reporting and Tracking (NeoSMART) | This device warms the baby, while using sensor technology to simultaneously capture vital signs, such as body temperature and heart rate, and track infant health data on a corresponding mobile app. | Following expanded studies, NeoSMART may potentially be applied across low-resourced clinical settings for critical populations, such as opioid-exposed newborns in the USA, babies with hypothermia in Kenya and Nigeria, and preterm births across multiple settings. |
| Summary: Opioid use is a public health crisis in Indiana. The biomedical device, Neonatal Swaddling, Monitoring, Automated Reporting and Tracking (NeoSMART), was initially developed for preterm infants in Kenya. With support from a GHRI Demonstration Grant and the collaboration of faculty from IU School of Medicine, Purdue University and Moi University, the device was further adapted, developed and tested for feasibility with infants exposed to opioids in-utero. This device comforts and warms the baby with a kangaroo mother care swaddling carrier, while using sensor technology to simultaneously capture vital signs and track infant health data on a corresponding mobile app. Preliminary data suggests that this ‘middle tech’ device accurately monitors infant vital signs, such as body temperature and heart rate.26–28 | |||||
| Case 3: Lieberman (USA) Chikowe (Malawi) | Malawi and Kenya | Demonstration Grant | Paper analytical device (PAD) | PAD was re-engineered to detect a wide range of risk elements commonly found among street drugs in the US and poor-quality pharmaceuticals in Malawi. | PAD has expanded to address safer behaviour among people who use drugs and become a tool for harm reduction counsellors in Chicago. |
| Summary: The PAD was originally developed to test faulty antibiotics inexpensively and rapidly in Kenya and Malawi by investigators from University of Notre Dame, AMPATH-Kenya, and the University of Malawi. They re-engineered an illicit drug PAD to then meet the needs of opioid harm reduction organisations in Chicago and detect a wide range of risk elements commonly found among street drugs in the USA through the support of GHRI funding. Since this funding, the use of PADs has been expanded and used to detect inferior quality chemotherapy products in Ethiopia, Malawi, Cameroon and Kenya, with US$2.5 million in funding received from the NIH. | |||||
NIH, National Institute of Health.