Dr Magoma Mwancha-Kwasa, Kenya
Dr Magoma Mwancha-Kwasa was destined for a career in medicine. “My mother would always tell us that we had to be doctors,” she recalls of her childhood in Kenya, and nearly everyone obeyed. Of her seven siblings, she says, 5 entered the field and 2 became physicians, giving her proud parents a grand total of 3 MDs. “So I always kind of knew that that’s what I would do.”
It wasn’t until her internship at a provincial hospital, though, that Mwancha-Kwasa knew exactly what kind of doctor she wanted to be. “When I arrived, I was surprised to find so many basic things missing,” she says. “We at times didn’t have basic drugs and other supplies such as sutures, and I began to think that it wasn’t just our patients who needed a doctor but the health system itself.” That experience moved Mwancha-Kwasa to keep her job as a medical officer in Kenya’s Ministry of Health, where her focus is on health service management, and, two years later, to apply for a TDR Clinical R&D Career Development Fellowship (CDF).
A one-of-a-kind program, the CDF affords developing country researchers the rare opportunity to develop skills not readily available in academic centers through 12 months of on-the-job training at a relevant company partner. In Mwancha-Kwasa’s case, that partner was the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND), a non-profit organization headquartered in Geneva, where as the Malaria Clinical Fellow, she’s been involved with projects under the purview of the group’s Malaria & Acute Febrile Syndrome (AFS) program.
“FIND has been a perfect fit,” says Mwancha-Kwasa, who, among other projects, coordinated a proof-of-concept study looking at the use of LAMP (loop-mediated isothermal amplification), a promising new technique for the detection of malaria parasites. “I was lucky because my advisors had already laid out a plan for me,” she says. “They knew my background, and they put me on projects that would give me hands-on experience ̶ I could write the protocol and then go into the field to see the study I’d designed in action, and to collect and analyze the data,” she says. “In Kenya, we do a lot of good things, but, as in many developing countries, we don’t evaluate the impact, so we don’t really know whether our strategies are effective, or if they’re as effective today as they were when we first started. Working at FIND, I’ve learned how to ask the right questions and to design a study that can answer this question, and I think that’s important.”
Last October, Mwancha-Kwasa attended the 6th MIM Pan African Malaria conference in Durban, South Africa and in November the 6th Moving Forward in Diagnostics Forum in Annecy, France, organized by BioMérieux and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSTMH). A first for the young researcher, the forum allowed Mwancha-Kwasa to engage with a broad spectrum of stakeholders—“scientists, policy-makers, manufacturers and even government regulators, all in one room,” she says. “It was great to be able to see these different players interact and to hear lessons learnt from other national lab programs.”