Our Partners
Department of Science & Innovation
Department of Science and Innovation seeks to boost socio-economic development in South Africa through research and innovation. To achieve its goals, the Department provides leadership, an enabling environment and resources for science, technology and innovation. Through its Programmes (Administration; Technology Innovation; International Cooperation and Resources; Research Development and Support; and Socio-economic Innovation Partnerships) and several entities that work alongside it, the Department is accomplishing groundbreaking science and enhancing the well-being of all South Africans.
Technology Innovation Agency
TIA is a national public entity that serves as the key institutional intervention to bridge the innovation chasm between research and development from higher education institutions, science councils, public entities, and private sector, and commercialisation.
DIPLOMICS
DIPLOMICS is a DSI funded infrastructure program that aims to connect researchers with a network of world-class omics facilities in South Africa.
The driving ambition behind DIPLOMICS is to facilitate this network in becoming internationally competitive through a number of different relevant interventions. These interventions are identified by the working groups within the network. There are three main pillars in the DIPLOMICS network:
D-Cyphr
The Department of Science and Innovation (DSI) embarked on a focused program for infrastructure capacitation in certain key areas in the South African Science and Innovation space in 2017. This program was called the South African Research Infrastructure Roadmap (SARIR) and one of the main programs (of 9 in total) is DIPLOMICS which has enabled the formation of the D-CYPHR hub through engagement with some of it’s network labs, notably the CPGR and IDM Core facility.
Separately the DSI funds the Technology Innovation Agency (TIA) whose remit is to help create technology platforms to facilitate the bioeconomy in SA. The CPGR, founded in 2007, has received funding from TIA to facilitate the creation of a service platform focusing on both proteomic and genomic needs within the country.
LabVine
LabVine provides laboratory content and experts for your ultimate solution. Use our features to attend to your learning, development and consulting needs.
LabVine was established in 2018 with the purpose of establishing a meeting place for laboratory professionals where they can learn, develop and discover by sharing knowledge and building on each other’s experience.
MADCaP Consortium
The Centre for Proteomic and Genomic Research (CPGR), is a collaborator on the US National Institutes of Health/National Cancer Institute funded research grant: Genetic Epidemiology of Prostate Cancer in Africa, U01-CA184374.
This flagship project, which is part of the Men of African Descent Carcinoma of the Prostate (MADCaP) network, is led by the Program Director Dr Timothy Rebbeck, Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI), Boston, MA, USA. The investigators in the MADCaP consortium are interested in understanding the complex multifactorial causes of prostate cancer etiology and outcomes among men of African ancestry worldwide, thereby collaborating on epidemiologic studies to address the high burden of prostate cancer among this population.
The role of the CPGR is to coordinate biospecimen preparation and logistics across seven African centres (Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal and South Africa) and perform the genotyping for over 5,000 samples on the custom developed MADCaP Axiom array which offers over 1.5 million markers and an imputation-aware GWS grid that tags over 94% of variants commonly found in African populations.
This is among the first research grants where the large scale genotyping component is performed on the African continent! The research grant began in August 2015 and will build on partnerships and collaborations established well into the future.
Golden Helix
The Golden Helix Foundation is an international non-profit research organization (registered London-based UK charity) aiming to advance research and education in the area of genome and personalized medicine. The Golden Helix Foundation aims to promote the development of research and the transfer and communication of knowledge from researchers and scientists in the wider scientific community through collaborative projects and conferences in the field of pharmacogenomics and personalized medicine.
