Medical research in Puducherry

Set on the outskirts of Puducherry, the former French colony which retains a significant Gallic flavour and hosts some seriously warm weather at this time of year, is the Jawaharal Nehru Institute of Postgraduate Medical Education and Research (JIPMER). I visited the institute earlier in the month with my colleague, Vimal Subramanian, to understand what they do and explore potential for more collaboration between JIPMER and UK partners. Of course, we’re not starting from zero, as Bharat Joshi (our Deputy High Commissioner in Chennai) recently set out at their 5th Convocation.

Celebrating its Golden Jubilee this year, JIPMER is a National Institute of Importance and was the first in India to teach European medicine. I started my visit by meeting Dr T S Ravikumar, the dynamic Director of the institute, who set out some of his forthcoming priorities and future plans. It was clear that JIPMER is increasing its focus on research at the moment. I was impressed by his plans in the areas of lung disease, healthcare quality and translational research in population level genomics and bioinformatics. He has coined the term transformatics to cover the latter, which was much less of a mouthful!

JIPMER also seeks to be the model for universal public healthcare in India. To that end Dr Ravikumar suggested to me he would be particularly interested to hear from UK academics working in the areas of health economics. This recent research article (which is admirably open access) into out of pocket health expenses in a villages services by one of JIPMER’s Rural Health Centres is a good introduction to this mission.

JIPMER combines teaching, treatment and research into a single campus, a set up familiar to those connected with the UK’s university teaching hospitals, and my impression that the three disciplines really supported each other to create an excellent climate for patient care and innovation. Following my meeting with the Director, Dr Parija, the Dean for Research (a newly created position), introduced me to come of his leading research faculty. They covered areas from neonatal care to microbiology and clinical pharmacology to physiology.

Each faculty member gave me a short presentation of their department’s work (with too much going on much to mention all of it here). Suffice to say, we’d be happy to introduce any interested UK researchers to colleagues at JIPMER. Projects which particularly stuck me included JIPMER’s National Centre for MRSA, their planned Regional Virology lab, and a big new centre on pharmaco-genomics research. Immediately, I saw potential to involve JIPMER researchers in our forthcoming events on Anti-microbial Resistance, Open Innovation in Drug Discovery and Hospital Acquired Infections and I hope JIPMER will be able to send attendees to each of them.

And, of course, Public Health and Wellbeing was identified as one of the priority areas for the Newton Fund programmes with India, so I’m hopeful that there will be future opportunities for UK institutions to partner with JIPMER in some way too. I’d certainly recommend medical researchers from the UK visiting India stop off in Puducherry. However, if you’re not a fan of the heat, I’d be tempted to call later in the year!