RRI Explained - ICGEB- Bioscience in South Africa and Beyond

[Music] Hello and welcome to RRI Explained, a REST BIOS podcast. It is the aim of the REST BIOS project to embed responsible research and innovation or RRI into four universities across Europe in the hope of improving the interconnectivity between science research and society with a particular focus on the biosciences. But what is RRI exactly? Well, hopefully we can find out together. Today we have a very special episode of the RRI Explained podcast because we're joined by free guests. Today we are joined by Dr. Louise Zabini, acting director of the International Centre of Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology or the ICGB, but also we are joined by Dr. Marriott Willem, Senior Scientist from Cancer Genomics Group and Claudia Russo, who is External Communications Officer at the ICGB. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you. First of all, I'd just quite like to know a little bit more about your background. So we might just go through each of you individually and you can just give a little sound bite of your background and what you do with the ICGB and the research you do. So, Luis, do you want to hear the first? Yeah, I'm in terms of science. I'm a molecular virologist, which is the degree I got at the University of St. Paul in Brazil. And then I moved to United States to Harvard Medical School for the postdoc. In 2009, I moved to South Africa. I'm currently the acting director for the Cape Town component as well as the group leader of Cancer Genomics. And basically, our group are performing research in many cancers of African importance, which is a topic that in the past was not much focused for the cancer community, but now it's being acquiring a lot of highlights and focus from the research community. Thank you very much. Marie, do you want to go next? Yes, I'm Marie. And I'm a research scientist in the research group. So we do like you say research on cancer. And then we like to focus our research to address the need of Africa. So we do research in the cancers that are almost prominent in Africa. And we focus on what makes the African population unique and how we respond to or why we respond in a certain manner to the disease. And Claudia? I'm Claudia Russo. I've been at ICGB for almost 10 years now. I work with Ritose Lee with Louise in his office, but I also work very closely with all the scientists in the research groups as well. We do a lot of the work on public info, external comments as well as outreach. The component is very active in those fields and you know getting the information out there about the great work that the scientists do yet. Okay, that's great. Thank you very much. The ICGB Centre in Cape Town was established in 2007 and has created kind of a central hub for bioscience research, research into cancers, research into viral diseases and just general bioscience, but also reaches out to the other ICG hubs in India and Italy for example, but also with wider science within the UN. Could I just ask what the main focuses of the Cape Town institutes are and the work you are doing currently? The Cape Town component was established as you mentioned in 2007 with the notion to benefit the most of the African continent. We just remember that the ICGB was established more than 35 years ago and the two first components were the three S components in which is our headquarters and then we have the new data component. But since the establishment in 2007, the ICGB Cape Town operates a lot of research programs focusing mainly in scientific excellence that can contribute not just the continent for the research communities across Africa and globally. I think we have seen six groups at the moment at the component focus on parasitic diseases, focus on cancer, it means we focus on infectious diseases and non-commonic diseases as well as in agriculture with our biopesticides and our plant genomics group. And in addition to that, we have the bioinformatics group. It means that the main areas focus in Cape Town, I just like to highlight the ICGB as an institution has 46 laboratories across the other components as well. Since the establishment of the ICGB in Cape Town, it has really expanded throughout Africa with a lot more member states for Africa but also with your collaborative work with the UN and these other institutes. How has this collaboration shifted focus away from Eurocentric kind of focus on research and innovation and is this sort of center collaboration beneficial for African research? ICGB has 66 member countries but as I mentioned before, the ICGB was established in Africa based on the notion that we realized that Africa was not benefiting the most of our activities. Then that's why in 2007, as I mentioned, there was the establishment of the ICGB Cape Town with the focus on establishing collaboration throughout the continent focusing in the Northern MSH countries like European and North America. And also to establish as a hub or a network that could connect all our member states. We have 66 member states. However, the African continent is the most represented continent among our membership. And then through this network, we could connect like more than 23 countries for enhancing capacity building research activities and establishment of different networks or another approach around in health, also running courses and meetings. It means it did help a lot to connect the African member states within our network and start exchanging our research capabilities through these countries. In recent years, obviously, the state of the state of bioscience and links with society have obviously been brought up to the forefront due to the onset of COVID. But obviously, there are other diseases and other issues that face the world a little bit. The one example that comes to mind obviously is the Ebola outbreak in West Africa that is still prominent now but seems to have taken a bit of a backseat to the COVID pandemic that is happening worldwide. I'm just wondering how COVID has impacted the research you do in other fields. Has it sort of benefited bioscience research as kind of bringing it to the forefront and having enhanced this knowledge exchange or has there been sort of pumping the breaks on other research, do you think? Yes and no. I mean, yes, in the sense that with the pandemic in the beginning, all the research activities they were shut down, even hospitals were redesigned to attend the COVID patients. It means at that time, a lot of, for example, in the health sector, a lot of hospitals which would have elective surgeries, they cancel all these surgeries and people with other diseases would be let's put this way on hold until the hospital resumes this kind of activities and the same time like researchers who are not able to come to the institutes and keep going with their own research. However, at the same time, all members of the research community found the need to get together and start working together in order to find solutions for the pandemic. Then in the same time, some other diseases were affected but the research community started working together, then many, many examples how people shift their focus to COVID and their knowledge acquire throughout the years or even for infectious disease researchers is much easier for them to shift the focus for COVID. I can see even by the speed that we achieve by acquiring vaccines, which may take a long time and work effort that everybody working together, then we could achieve not just this but some other measures that were put in place in order to block the COVID transmission. In this sense, yes, some diseases were research, toward certain diseases were affected in terms of it was not the priority at that time but at the same, the networks were built because of COVID that will for me will last for a long time in post COVID era. How about you, Marie, how is the COVID pandemic affected the world that you do within the cancer genomics group? I would agree with Louise. I think that it really made networking much easier. It made us slow in the beginning, but I think we're back up to speed because initially there was access to the labs for limited, but we're back now. And I think it made our networks stronger and our interactions with colleagues across the world much better. And I suppose it's allowed for this co-creation, this co-working to be much more easier, I suppose, because yes, we all do miss face-to-face interactions, but obviously this interview wouldn't take place so readily if we weren't so, so verse now in online communication. So I suppose having this kind of infrastructure put into place is probably help the ICGB network expand and work more with colleagues even if it is in a remote setting. Yeah, tremendous. It's really opened up. It's broken down the boundaries, you know, the physical boundaries that exist. So it's much easier to connect with everyone really through platforms like this. We have a very nice example within the ICGB. I can tell you other examples that I know about the community in Africa, but at ICGB we in partnership with the Bimmelinda Gates, we established the Gates project that we call which is the LAMP essay is a COVID test, which is colorimetric and then you can do remote areas what the only thing that you need is water bath at the 65 degrees. And initially we within our network we put this project in five countries in Africa and to test if we will be able to do this and we were successful and now after being successful in five countries we are now extending the project for additional 10 countries in Africa in which we're going to implement this very fast COVID test. So what has been the main challenges when it comes to communicating and working with African nations, African locals with the biosciences fields, obviously there's been a global sort of infordump of information and misinformation and sometimes societal mistrust, but I'm just wondering if the African component to that is, if it's a different environment really if just because due to the variety of different populations that are in Africa there are some that are in cities but some that are remote but also they've had issues with as I said before, Ebola, malaria, other different issues that face biocommunications and science communication when it comes to the field of biosciences when it comes to the African perspective. So from our perspective, from the ICGB perspective, the issues challenging science and society in this bridging the gap is more of a global one, it's not specifically regional, of course every region has its dynamic but from what we've seen it's more of a global one, an example would be the misinformation that happened in recent times, it became so extremely evident and ICGB was actually very active in trying to fight the misinformation we put in that term and it wasn't just relatable to COVID-19, it was COVID-19 vaccines, cancer therapeutics as well as GMOs, that sort of misinformation is filtering around and to combat this or to try and you know trying to fight it, it's really recently hosted a public engagement events called ICGB Science and the City which is a very popular science communication or science engagement model where we bring scientists directly to the public so the experts come to the public and we open it up to to anyone really, face to face as well as online so that's where careful like this was was very helpful and the topic we did actually was called Mythbusters, discrediting misinformation in science where we spoke about you know is it fact or fake news and this is just one of the sort of activities ICGB does when it comes to bridging the gap or using biosciences and the information that we have to bridge the gap between science and society and bring science closer to the people another thing I think that's very good is our website, the ICGB website and we put a lot of our talks and our podcasts that are there as well as information readily available and that's therefore available for globally but then of course also you know to the African member states or the African population law particularly interested another thing that I want to add I know you mentioned like you have some people that are living in cities and some that are more you know rural this part of this ICGB Science and the City we're hoping to take it across South Africa and also to be able to broadcast it in different nationals, South Africa national languages so therefore to make it more accessible to to the bigger population so ICGB is we're very active in terms of public engagement and getting the science research that our colleagues do and taking it out there. Now that sounds fantastic and yeah really a noble thing to be doing and bridging the gap between as you say society and the biosciences which obviously now in so many ways is at the forefront it's probably one of the fields that kind of impacts society most with food security with climate change with disease and health and that sort of thing so yeah the work that you're doing is it sounds fantastic and leads quite well on to my next question really which is more kind of focused on responsible research and innovation obviously RRI the ICGB and some of your members were they work closely with the respire project the Wies is part of the advisory board to the project but you also worked previously with the Star Bios project as well so I'm just wondering how how important these initiatives are and how RRI has influenced the work that you do within the ICGB. Since the establishment of ICGB the Institute has always incorporated RRI within its activities again not just in Cape Town but also in Trees and New Delhi and India. We try to focus on the UN sustainable development goals we have many examples we have our fellowship programs in terms of for example gender balance, women in science recently we have at least three different calls in partnership with three different we went offices in order to promote women in science. Our collaborative research program also is focused on building human capacity and quality education. To be honest I think working initially with the Star Bios was really good because I could see that ICGB since its establishment always been working RRI but at that time it was a different name and then we realized after joining Star Bios that that was responsible research and innovation then we tried to get this point that we usually we had before and trying to increase our activities that was really helpful for us because we could visualize the point that we were doing but not doing enough even though we were the fewest institutions doing at that time but we realized we need to do much more in that aspect. I think Manit can add something because she is very into the ASIC about some of our programs. I was part of the Star Bios project the one that was before Grace Bios and for me I think it's important that we implement these principles throughout all our activities. I want to highlight one of the fellowship programs that you briefly mentioned and that's the RISTO project mostly because all the WISTO fellowship programs mostly because I like it. It specifically aimed for women science but from Africa. These fellowships of us hours if you go to the website and you take a look at them. With them we are trying to bring in gender equality work on it and together with that together with youth we believe that that should be the focus to nurture a bright future. These are essentially the cross-cutting themes in the ICGB approach to RRI and all our activities reflects this. No it seems that a lot of like the RRI principles, the five keys are obviously things that were in the back of people's minds before the instigation of RRI but the formalization of the principles just sort of brought it to the forefront and can it gave a framework for research institutes just yourselves or universities or even businesses really to just sort of rethink how they approach these issues within the framework and to just put out. at the forefront and not as an afterthought really. So having that kind of link between society and research and promoting the greater good of the world really, I suppose, and having, yeah, just having the forethought to think about the research you're doing, obviously with the ICGB, a lot of that is very directly impacts society and that sort of thing, but using these keys, it feels that you are connecting greater with society and just sort of addressing some of the, addressing some needs that need to be changed throughout as kind of a climate shift for researchers a whole, it seems. Is there any of the projects that the ICGB are doing that you'd like to highlight at this moment in time? - I was just thinking, okay, so one of the projects or programs that's now become a marked activity in our calendar, we know of us between three to four school visits every year where we have about 20 learners from different schools around Cape Town and Greater Cape Town. They come to the ICGB for the day and they are scientists for the day, they get to engage with our researchers like Marit and Louise and many others. In all the different research groups that Louise had already mentioned and they get to do hands on activities. So it's another way that we try to look at education, for example, in RRI. We also often have quite a lot of young girls or women learn this that come. So again, we focus on the gender. And so they get to be in the lab so that's for the full day and we try to then encourage careers in the bioscience. But one of the key parts of our school outreach program is we do work with the FaultScope. I don't know if you know about it. It's a paper, a microscope. It costs about $1 per microscope but it has a magnification of 140, 140 like Marie Tension. Marie does quite a lot of the, you know, she does a lot of the hands on when it comes to the FaultScope. And it's really incredible because it's essentially, we can take these FaultScope, these paper mics for microscopes and go out into low resource settings and encourage the use to get out there and to be interested. So I thought that would be a nice project to highlight that we do many projects across many crosscutting themes but the school outreach one, but the highlight of the FaultScope is very popular. - Here's what's the program. We're really trying to put the, let the students do the research. So we put the puppet in their hands. We gave them the safety equipment, of course. And then we let them do the experiments and they're really enjoyed it. And the first time they would see, we always have a little bit of fond water to look up under the microscope in the FaultScope. And the first time they see something move there, the excitement is just contagious. - That is another project that in terms of RRI, that I like to mention, is not really a project, something that I see should be doing a lot. Just to go through the conversation, which is regarding the one of the other pillars of RRI, which is the open access. I just want to highlight that I see should be working on the access for a long time. We have every single talk or event that we have, we record this event or this talk. And we put freely available in our website. Currently we have more than 600 records in our library. And this started a long time ago, even probably remembering the beginning, you remember items, right? They only, they only, glad from they have for you to buy music. At that time, I see, you already have agreement with iTunes and we put usually, we put our records in the iTunes for free. I think it was the only thing for free. I'm not sure he's picking here on the correction. And now we have many other platforms like YouTube, et cetera. And then we've been able to put this for free in our website, also can help for educational purposes. Let's say someone in the middle of Africa, who is teaching molecular biology, he can go to our library and get the talk of one expert in molecular biology in some areas and can use that talk as a starting point for a class in the middle of a little resource setting. - No, it sounds amazing. And it's just you are putting out these resources just available for other science communicators or educational leads just to sort of either work directly with the ICGB or to facilitate their own sort of science communication or curriculum teaching just to sort of incorporate real science and real researchers into, yeah, I'm bringing them to the forefront as either role models or just sort of to collaborate with the teaching, I suppose, and that sounds fantastic. And just to reiterate, I used to be a freshwater scientist. So I do understand the joys of looking down a microscope and seeing a tardy grade or a wall defect the first time. And I imagine the kids love that. - For sure they do. The excitement is very high. That these few screams in there, it's really, it's really a very engaging project. - And sometimes we work with other institutions because Manupra Rash, from Stanford, is the guy who created this. And we work with him, but we also work with other institutions with our working with sometimes with children in different countries. We sometimes even donate these folks codes for them to run like a workshop with the kids, which is also quite an interesting which is completely, is different from the excellent science in the labs. You understand, but at the same time everything is connected. - Yeah, as you say, everything's interconnected. It's just bringing science to young people who will then disseminate it to their parents or their guardians or the communities. And hopefully through that web of kind of communication, you can just build that foundation of the importance of bioscience and the work that you do at the ICGB. - Yep. - Yep, absolutely. - Thank you all for joining us today. - Yeah, wonderful. - Thank you for having us. - You've let us know and I hope you have a nice day. - The REST BIOS project is funded by the EU with the grant number 872146. To learn more about the REST BIOS project and the other pillars of RRI, please go to restbios.eu. Thank you for joining us. See you next time. (upbeat music)