26 July 2012 - Washington DC and Franklin Lakes, New Jersey - Becton, Dickinson and Company (BD), a leading global medical technology company, and the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) through the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), today announced Labs for Life, a new collaboration to help strengthen healthcare and laboratory systems in the developing world.
The new collaboration, valued at $20 million, builds on a prior five-year public-private partnership (PPP) between BD and PEPFAR that focused on improving overall laboratory systems and services in sub-Saharan African countries severely affected by HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis (TB).
Labs for Life will include Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia and Mozambique and also expand outside of Africa to India. Senior officials from PEPFAR, CDC and BD announced the new collaboration at the International AIDS Conference in Washington, D.C.
A five-year agreement, Labs for Life builds on the success of the initial laboratory strengthening program and will focus on:
- Quality improvement for laboratory services to attain national, regional, or international accreditation
- Laboratory Human Resources training on pathology, forecasting and optimization
- Curriculum development and training on equipment maintenance
- Collaboration with the African Centre for Integrated Laboratory Training (ACILT) and the African Society for Laboratory Medicine (ASLM) to strengthen local capacity and promote country ownership and sustainability
- Use of HIV systems to address non-communicable diseases - such as diabetes - and creation of capabilities in health systems to adopt point-of-care technologies.