Getting better together
- Beth Amato
Conquering diseases such as cancer requires many minds. A transdisciplinary approach, via hubs, can enable thriving.
“How can engineers, pathologists, ethicists, computer scientists and statisticians form a robust, multidisciplinary team to diagnose cancer faster, design our own biotechnologies and push training and innovation?”
This was the question that galvanised Professor Reubina Wadee, Co-Director of the new Wits Digital Pathology Hub (DPH). Wadee figured that solving critical problems, particularly in the swift diagnosis and treatment of cancer, requires people to ask different questions.
“We need to get a range of people with diverse skills together to tackle this problem,” says Professor Tanya Augustine, also a Co-Director of the DPH.
Pathological shortage
Necessity is the mother of invention and the DPH enables multidisciplinary clinical interrogation and bolsters the anatomical pathologists in the public sector – only 38 in number – who handle thousands of specimens.
A shortage of pathologists must be addressed in the long term through nurturing young medical students and inspiring them to become pathologists.
“Embedding digital pathology in undergraduate and postgraduate teaching means our future clinicians will speak both medical and computational languages,” says Augustine.
Scientist-AI co-creation
Traditional pathology requires specialists to manually analyse thousands of slides, most of which show common malignancies such as breast and prostate cancers. The DPH aims to develop the capacity for artificial intelligence and digital imaging for streamlining cancer diagnosis.
“By training algorithms to digitise and triage these cases, we aim to free up pathologists’ time for rarer, more complex diagnoses,” explains Dr Carl Chen, a member of the DPH who brings his genetics research expertise from the Wits Sydney Brenner Institute for Molecular Bioscience and the South African National Cancer Registry.
Augustine says, “We want to make digital pathology both faster and fairer. The systems available now are expensive and proprietary. We are asking how we can build scalable, home-grown tools that work for African contexts?” She says that the skills to do so are readily available through multidisciplinary collaborations with Wits teams in information engineering, computer science, the Machine Intelligence and Neural Discovery Institute and the WITS Biohub.
Health research ecosystem
On the busy intersection of Carse O’ Gowrie Road and Houghton Drive in Johannesburg is one of Wits’ most ambitious projects of the last century: The Wits Interdisciplinary and Translational Science Biohub (WITS BioHub), a first-of-its-kind entity to reimagine how health research ecosystems are the life and soul of innovation.
It is a new campus where science, once in silos, now comes together with other disciplines to form an integrated system to transform Africa’s healthcare future. The WITS BioHub represents a R1.3 billion capital investment, designed to sustain innovative research, provide opportunities for collaboration, commercialisation, clinical trial services and biotech partnerships.
Professor Shabir Madhi, Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences, says: “The WITS BioHub represents the next frontier for the Faculty of Health Sciences. It will give our scientists and partners the infrastructure to turn ideas into diagnostics, vaccines and treatments that save lives. More than that, it positions South Africa as a leader in health innovation, building solutions that respond to our own challenges while contributing globally.”
Bedside-to-bench-to-breakthrough
Africa carries intersecting burdens of disease where infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and HIV, and non-communicable diseases including cancer, diabetes and cardiovascular illnesses, are on the rise. Yet Africa contributes very marginally to global health solutions. The WITS BioHub was the answer.
“We want a place where patients’ health needs, discovery science, implementation science, as well as the potential for commercial spinouts, can underpin our bedside-to-bench-to-breakthrough vision,” says Professor Aletta Millen, Assistant Dean for Research in the Faculty of Health Sciences, for whom the Wits BioHub is also about deeper structural transformation.
“The WITS BioHub addresses fragmentation and brings pockets of excellence together in one place to drive mission-driven research,” says Millen and references Africa’s rich data, innovative technology and entrepreneurial prowess. “We must solve our own problems and not rely on expensive proprietary software or expertise from the Global North. The rate of change is rapid. Transdisciplinary collaboration is not optional, but critical to our shared future.”
- Beth Amato is a freelance writer.
- This article first appeared in?CURIOS.TY,?a research magazine produced by?Wits Communications?and the?Research Office.
- Read more in the 20thissue, themed #Thrive, which explores what it truly means to flourish — across a lifespan, within communities, and on and with our planet.