UCSF and Vietnam formalized their historic relationship in health sciences research and teaching on March 12 when top officials signed letters of intent for collaboration.
UCSF Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Eugene Washington and Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Pham Gia Khiem exchanged gifts and signed documents for projects involving UCSF, Global Health Sciences (GHS) and the California Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Research, also known as QB3.
The visit to UCSF by Vietnamese officials, including the Vietnamese ambassador to the United States, the deputy minister of education and the director of the Ho Chi Minh City Health Department, signals the importance to Vietnam of strengthening its ties with UCSF, GHS and QB3, a joint venture with UCSF, UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz that is headquartered at UCSF Mission Bay.
The Vietnamese are interested in learning more about UCSF's approach to integrating clinical services, research and teaching in nursing, pharmacy and medicine. They also want to develop research and training programs in stem cell and biomedical research in Vietnam.
The San Francisco Bay Area is an acknowledged center of biotechnology, and UCSF and QB3 are world leaders in novel studies that hold the promise of advances in the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of life-threatening illnesses. GHS works to improve health and reduce health disparities on a global scale, in part by training the next generation of global health scientists and clinicians and partnering with institutions to help them build programs in health care and life sciences.
Since switching to a free-market system in 1986, Vietnam has developed one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, but lags behind industrialized nations in trained personnel, equipment and facilities in health sciences. Their motivation to improve is great, since Vietnamese people have a high risk of infectious diseases such as bacterial diarrhea, hepatitis A, typhoid fever and malaria.
"Currently, Vietnam ranks above only one Southeast Asian country, Bangladesh, in its capacity to provide vaccines and drugs for its people," says Regis Kelly, executive director of QB3. "To improve that ranking, the government of Vietnam is seeking drastic improvements in the quality and quantity of its life science industries. Given its meager resources, it must exercise considerable care in seeking competent and committed help from outside institutions. I feel honored that Vietnam has chosen to work with UCSF and QB3."
Expanding Opportunities
Individual UCSF faculty members have been conducting research and training health professionals in Vietnam for several years. UCSF-Vietnamese projects include:
* The UCSF Center for Reproductive Health
Research & Policy developed a course for Vietnamese policymakers and clinicians
and faculty at San Francisco General Hospital will teach a course on evidence-based
learning in Vietnam in June.
* A team from the Department of Psychiatry,
spent 17 days in Ho Chi Minh City in fall 2006 teaching and consulting about
mental health care with their Vietnamese counterparts as well as exploring
research opportunities;
* The Institute for Global Health and
Center for AIDS Prevention Studies have conducted several studies in Vietnam,
including a qualitative study of discrimination faced by people living with
HIV/AIDS in Vietnam.
Haile Debas, executive director of GHS, and Mary Anne Koda-Kimble, dean of the UCSF School of Pharmacy, led a group of UCSF faculty and staff from pharmacy, nursing and medicine to Hanoi in 2004. They participated in a jointly organized conference on the role of pharmacists in health care delivery in Vietnam and met with leaders of health sciences universities from all over Vietnam.
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UCSF Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Eugene Washington, left, signs letters of intent for collaboration with Nguyen The Dung, director of the Ho Chi Minh City Health Department, while Deputy Prime Minister Pham Gia Khiem, center, watches during their visit to UCSF on March 12. |
That occasion also marked the beginning of a relationship between GHS and the University of Medicine and Pharmacy (UMP) in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam's largest and most populous city. Planning is now underway for a joint UMP/UCSF quarterly seminar series and discussions have begun around developing stem cell related research and training programs.
"Vice Premier Khiem's visit elevates our evolving relationship with Vietnam to a new level," said Debas. "I believe this visit will greatly assist us in moving nascent, but important, collaborations forward."
Following a request by UMP for assistance in a variety of training areas, GHS sought advice from faculty across UCSF who had experience working in Vietnam. These discussions encouraged the belief that UCSF could forge strategic partnerships with UMP and other institutions and organizations in Vietnam. In June 2006, GHS led a delegation to Ho Chi Minh City to hold in-depth discussions and site visits with UMP and Soy Y Te (HCMC Department of Health) to better understand their needs and begin to plan specific programs.
That visit also celebrated the official opening of a UCSF Project Office in Ho Chi Minh City, the first US academic project office ever approved in Vietnam. GHS and Vietnamese agreed to begin an exchange program for mental health services and training, and UCSF is working with the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology-Vietnam to develop a training program in health care management.
Last October, officials at UMP honored Kelly and Debas by inviting them to give keynote addresses on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of that university after the conclusion of the Vietnam War.
Collaborating with QB3
The Vietnamese government has shown increasing enthusiasm to work with QB3 over the past two years, says Kelly. After six visits of QB3 leadership to Vietnam and five of Vietnamese leadership to UCSF, they have decided to work together in three areas.
The first area involves applying systems biology technologies emerging from the laboratories of Jonathan Weissman and Nevan Krogan to identify drugs in traditional herbal medicines that have important mechanisms of action. Vietnam has 4,000 medicinal plants, a rich source of potentially important pharmaceuticals and employment opportunities.
The second area is nurturing the aquaculture industry of fresh and salt water fish, sources of income for poor farmers and fisherman. Each year massive pathogen infestations destroy a significant fraction of Vietnam's cultured fish and the problem is getting worse each year, according to Kelly. Countries such as Norway, Japan and the US have developed vaccines for some of the pathogens, but none have so far been commercially viable for the strains of pathogens that infect Vietnamese fish. QB3 is helping the Vietnamese ministry of Science and Technology to assemble a team of scientists capable of generating cost-effective vaccines tailored to protect against Vietnamese pathogens, Kelly said.
"To grow these two types of industry, Vietnam needs a better trained workforce," Kelly said. "They are intrigued by the concept of cohort training that QB3 has developed for the Malaysian government and want to explore whether it makes financial sense to mount a parallel program with QB3."
This story first appeared in the Spring 2007 edition of UCSF Newsbreak.
Photo/Christine Jegan
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