Recipient organisationMahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit
Other organisations recorded by Europe PMCMahidol University · Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust · University of OxfordThese are researcher affiliations; the award is counted once under the primary recipient above.
Funding£100.2M
PeriodOct 2025 — Oct 2032
In plain English
AI plain-English summary
A network of research units across Southeast Asia and Africa will spend the next seven years tackling infectious diseases that hit the world’s poorest communities hardest. The Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit (MORU) focuses on diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis, and neglected tropical infections that disproportionately affect people in low-resource settings. A major driver of the programme is antimicrobial resistance—the growing ability of bacteria and parasites to shrug off standard drugs—which threatens to make common infections untreatable. Climate change is also shifting the geography of disease, bringing old threats to new populations. If the research succeeds, it could change how clinicians diagnose and treat infections in settings where lab tests are scarce. The programme aims to produce affordable, deployable tools—from better dosing regimens for existing drugs to new treatment protocols for drug-resistant infections—that can be used by village health workers as well as intensive care teams. It also invests in training local researchers, so that scientific leadership in these regions does not depend on outside institutions. The ultimate goal is to improve health outcomes for hundreds of millions of people while building a more equitable global research ecosystem.
View original technical description
MORU’s research programme aims to improve the health and well-being of people living in low-resource settings across the tropical world through high quality science and its translation. We will conduct clinical and laboratory research on diseases that disproportionately affect disadvantaged communities. Through discovery research we will identify and understand these health threats, and then innovate affordable and deployable solutions to counter them. We address health challenges along the entire patient pathway, from the village health worker to the intensive care unit. We will address major challenges, with the aim of benefitting hundreds of millions of people.We will focus on infectious diseases and maternal and child health, and the emerging health threats of antimicrobial resistance and climate change. We are committed to ethical research practices and community engagement to ensure our work is relevant. We will improve the techniques to assess and optimise new and existing antimicrobial treatments, and then conduct high-quality clinical trials to assess them. We will strengthen stakeholder partnerships and collaborations to ensure our research agenda is equitably set, and our research is translated into impact. We will develop local research leaders and build research capacity to improve health outcomes and contribute to a more equitable world.
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