What do you think the overall challenges are in Global Health?

Remco: While the biggest challenge in Global Health is funding, another, no less important challenge, is that of finding the right partners with which to work, and managing these partnerships in the best and most appropriate way. In Global Health, we are moving in a direction where partners from endemic countries (those on the ground dealing with diseases like malaria, TB and schistosomiasis) are taking more of a leading role in projects. This is good and where we should be going. A challenge remains, however, in putting things into practice and knowing how to collaborate well. You have to build trust, which takes a long time. This can be especially so in consortia where there are partners from all over the world, which is often the case in global health projects of course. There can be cultural differences, differences between clinical trial teams, manufacturing teams, and access teams, for example. These all need to come together and as such, leadership is key – knowing how to streamline and keep things on track. 

Kristina: Global health is a very broad concept. We deal with a lot of infectious diseases – bacterial and parasitic diseases, for example. Many of the parasitic diseases are considered by the World Health Organisation (WHO) as NTDs, but there are many others that are not part of the WHO list and that are even more neglected due to lack of funding as there’s little economic incentive for commercial companies to spend money on them. So yes, as Remco says, funding remains a big challenge. Because of the lack of funding, we have to be very efficient with our resources in Global Health. I think the Global Health community has been quite thrifty and clever in this regard, but there is definitely a big need for more funding and more collaboration. Our challenge as Lygature is to unite this community and connect the right people with each other, both within a certain disease, but perhaps even more importantly, between different disease areas.