We interviewed Mudarshiru Bbuye, coordinator of the Coalition’s Virology, Immunology and Diagnostics working group, about his work in the area of infectious diseases and his collaboration with the Coalition. Bbuye is a research fellow at the Makerere University Lung Institute.

We interviewed Prof. Caesar Atuire, a member of the Coalition’s Ethics Working Group, about “Country ownership in global health”, an opinion piece by Dr Abdisalan Mohamed Noor published earlier this year in PLOS Global Public Health. Prof. Atuire shared his perspective on Dr Noor’s lessons learned and their importance for a fairer, more global response to future pandemics.

All COVID-19 Clinical Research Coalition members were invited to come together to take stock of our successes and challenges and to contribute to a discussion of the Coalition’s evolving future.

We welcome the addition of Dr Elvis Temfack to the COVID-19 Clinical Research Coalition’s Steering Committee as a representative of the African Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC).

Seven members of the COVID-19 Clinical Research Coalition participated in a side event on lessons learnt on the strength of collaboration during the COVID-19 pandemic at the Second International Conference on Public Health in Africa (CPHIA 2023) in Kigali, Rwanda on 12 Dec 2022. The session saw researchers sharing challenges and solutions in a series of talks that ranged from how to re-think research partnerships between institutions in the global South and North to planning for pandemic preparedness that would see strengthened disease surveillance through biobanking and sequencing capacity across the continent.