The GACD secretariat co-ordinates joint calls for implementation research projects. These calls focus on major NCDs (i.e. hypertension, diabetes, lung diseases and mental ill-health). Within the tenure of the grant under WP1 the GACD staff team has regularly convened a Strategy Board of the high level representatives of funding agencies to continue to identify, prioritise, align and agree future call topics. GACD has completed a joint call to explore the adoption of interventions for hypertension and diabetes at scale; together the agencies have committed US$51m to support research projects that address the scale up of strategies to reduce the burden of NCDs. The outcome of this call was widely communicated and information on each of the projects is available here
https://www.gacd.org/research-projects?diseases=scale-up&programme-countries(se abrirá en una nueva ventana)GACD secured agreement on a sixth call in cancer prevention that has been fully coordinated and facilitated by the secretariat team. The call launched in November 2019. Although the call timeline was extended as a result of COVID-19, with peer review activities taking place in early 2021. The GACD funding agencies have supported and individually announced the cancer prevention projects that will form the latest GACD Cancer Research Programme. The implementation projects supported include research in more than fifteen LMICs around the world associated with a range of cancers.
GACD has worked to facilitate agreement amongst the funding agencies on the topics for three future annual calls.
In addition, within WP2 the GACD secretariat proactively fosters networking amongst the worldwide project teams it supports through a range of events held during the year including webinars (annually in 2019, 2020 and 2021) and Annual Scientific Meetings (Bangkok November 2019, ‘virtual’ in November 2020). The programme, handbook and presentations for each of these are disseminated to the research network and funding agencies and are available from the GACD website.
GACD uniquely supports a growing cadre of implementation science investigators through the delivery of research capacity strengthening activities including Implementation Science Workshops and Schools for early to mid-career investigators. A Workshop and School were held in Bangkok in 2019 and a virtual School was held in December 2020.
To enhance the impact of its activities GACD supports a number of active cross cutting thematic working groups who matrix activities amongst the disease specific research programmes fostered through the individual calls. There have been a series of joint publications from these working groups highlighted and disseminated by GACD.
