The third consortium meeting and second annual meeting of PHINDaccess took place in Tunis City in February 22, 2022.
The partners were looking forward to meet again and discuss the advancement of the project since the last they met in October 2019.
With the extension of the project (due to the pandemic) for one more year, the project will end in September 30, 2022.
This meeting allowed the partners and the WP’s leaders to present an overview of all the actions implemented in the last two years of the project and prepare this very last phase and discuss potential new collaborations in the future.
Recommendations from the Scientific Advisory Board
The Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) members (represented by Jessica Kissinger and Toni Gabaldon) appreciate the project's endeavors and accomplishments. The project deals with institutional changes that are very hard to address. They emphasized the importance of the work done through collaboration within the consortium for the set-up of the cluster, LIMS, and tools (such tools for biobanking). This enables to increase the positioning of IPT to become a hub for genomic and bioinformatic in the country and the whole region.
Regarding sustainability, SAB members recommend developing a concrete plan to measure the accomplishments and to evaluate the capacity improvement needs to be done in order to align with appropriate sustainable actions.
The SAB members stressed the risk related to sustaining human resources and talents in such a difficult context.
Finally, a monitoring and progress assessment should be done in order to evaluate the situation before and beyond the project and to evaluate the capacity impact. This kind of analysis will be more useful to make before the grant ends.
In the next months of the project the PHINDaccess consortium will be focused on finalizing the last actions of the project and to close it with an open final meeting in September 2022 in Tunis.