Gorrie family supports AIDS research partnership in Tanzania

Thomas Gorrie

Published February 3, 2009, last updated on March 8, 2013 under Education News

Thomas M. Gorrie, PhD, says the sustainability and multidisciplinary approach of Duke’s partnership with Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Center (KCMC) in Moshi, Tanzania, is what led his family recently to gift the program with $500,000 in operating support.

For more than a decade, the unique partnership, now supported by the Duke Global Health Institute, has conducted significant research on AIDS, tuberculosis, and other diseases in Tanzania, helped build a child-centered family care clinic, developed international laboratory standards, and improved the information technology infrastructure.

The program provides advanced medical care and training to people in Tanzania-including several young professionals who have gone on to complete postgraduate degrees in the U.S. and U.K.-as well as research and education opportunities for Duke faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, medical residents, and fellows.

Inaddition to medicine, participants represent many different areas of expertise at Duke, including public policy, engineering, business, divinity, and arts and sciences.

“This model works anywhere, whether it’s in Africa or Durham, North Carolina,” says Gorrie. “It’s a great way to extend the reach of Duke’s multidisciplinary knowledge and expertise-it’s good for people in resource-poor areas, and it’s good for Duke.”

Gorrie, a Duke University trustee, chair of the Duke University Health System Board of Directors, and honorary member of the Duke Medicine Board of Visitors, spent more than 33 years at Johnson & Johnson and retired in March as vice president for government affairs and policy. He said he hopes to be able to visit the Duke research and clinical site in Moshi next year.

The program is under the direction of Duke Assistant Clinical Professor John A. Crump, MD. John Bartlett, MD, a Duke professor of infectious diseases, has served as the faculty liaison over the past four years.

Among many important research findings to come out of the partnership, Bartlett cited one that has close ties to North Carolina. Using a new blood plasma pooling technique pioneered at UNC-Chapel Hill, Duke and KCMC researchers became the first to diagnose and treat HIV infection in a pregnant woman who contracted the virus during her pregnancy. (Normal HIV antibody testing takes several months, and it can’t detect extremely low levels of the virus in early infection.)

The early diagnosis allowed doctors to act quickly to protect the health of the mother and avoid transmitting the virus to her child. Bartlett says outcomes like these are the result of decades of day-to-day collaboration and capacity-building.

“The Gorrie family has given us the gift of stability,” says Bartlett, who recently returned to Durham to become associate director of research at the Duke Global Health Institute. “This gift will allow us to focus on our long-term goals for delivering training, building infrastructure, conducting research, and delivering care. We are enormously grateful.”

Originally found here.

“This model works anywhere, whether it’s in Africa or Durham, North Carolina. It’s a great way to extend the reach of Duke’s multidisciplinary knowledge and expertise-it’s good for people in resource-poor areas, and it’s good for Duke.”

Thomas Gorrie

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