Grants and supports

ACE Mali has received some NIH-founded grants:

West African Center of Excellence for Global Health Bioinformatics Research Training Tulane University and USTTB (WACEB): Support for 5 PhD and 15 MSc students
West African Sustainable Leadership and Innovation Training in Bioinformatics Research (WASLITBRe) with Covenant University, Nigeria.
Pan African Bioinformatics Network (H3ABioNet) for the Human Heredity and Health in Africa (H3Africa) consortium.
eLwazi consortium: Collaboration across multiple institutions aiming to develop an Open Data Science Platform.

At National level, a couple of grants were founded by USTTB and CNRST:

Prediction of structural models of two P falciparum drug target and their inhibitors
Development of new coronavirus drug targets and in silico screening of inhibitors from natural products data bases

ACE Mali has founded two seed grants through the Fogarty training grant.

Identification of promising high-affinity inhibitors of SARS-CoV-2 main protease from African natural products Databases by Virtual Screening
Computational Based SLIMs approach identifies Plasmodium Tryptophan protein A5K5E5_PLAVS as an interactor for Band 3 Anion Transporter

Workshops and Symposiums

Since 2018, ACE Mali has delivered annual international Data science and Bioinformatics workshops and symposiums at USTTB to foster growth in research education on computationally intensive topics including statistical programming, bioinformatics analyses, spatial data science, and database management.
3 symposiums on Bioinformatics and Data science were organized and the participants came from 12 a dozen of African countries, France, and USA.
ACE Mali students have attended different training workshops in Bioinformatics such as:
WASLITBRe Consortium Meeting at Covenant University in Nigeria
Grant Writing workshop on Metagenomics at KNUST in Ghana
Internships at Tulane University, New Orleans, USA
Open Science Grid (OSG) In-person training workshop in USA
ACE Mali is hosting different H3Abionet classrooms for: IBT, NGS course, 16S rRNA Microbiome course and African Genomic Medicine Training Initiative (AGMT)

ACE Mali Outreach activities

ACE Mali has organized different conferences on ACE at Universities and Research Centers for students and junior researchers as well as the Open doors for press and potential users.
Some awareness activities were carried out by ACE Mali Alumni and staff.
ACE Mali website, eLwazi platform, H3ABionet, social networks and radio shows are used to for large information sharing.

ACE Mali VR lab setting Up.

There is a big room space arranged for the installation of VR lab.
Will facilitate the training of molecular modeling, medical education, surgery and diagnostic and drug effect study.
Collaboration with medical practitioners and private partners or better use of the technology
There is a Great expectation!

Short training/ services offer by ACE Mali to local students and junior researchers.

ACE Mali Challenge and Opportunity

Some challenges are:

To serve as a technical support and training center for Malian research institutions.
To prepare the second classrooms for short training.
To overcome linguistic barriers

Some opportunities are:

Government’s support through USTTB: Infrastructure, electrical power, and salaries for the staff
Availability of sequencing facilities at different research institutions, the generated data could be analyzed with ACE Mali’s assistance.
Assistance from the NIAID/NIH: providing equipment and resources for training, technical support.
Partnership with ODSP eLwazi: Recruitment of staff members, technical support, and training opportunity
Grant opportunity through collaboration with ACE Uganda and Networks