WWARN Director Philippe Guérin

Dr Guérin was appointed WWARN Executive Director in January 2009. Dr Guérin has extensive experience working in the field for Médecins sans Frontières and a researcher for a Wellcome Trust Research Unit in Africa and Asia. Following three years as a Senior Advisor to the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, Dr Guérin joined Épicentre in Paris, a World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Centre for Research in epidemiology and response to emerging diseases, where he served as Scientific Director for six years before moving to WWARN. Read Philippe's full profile.

Dr Philippe Guérin

1. What is the main aim of WWARN?

In the last 60 years antimalarial resistance has been a major obstacle to malaria control. Emergence of resistance to first chloroquine, then sulfadoxine-pyrimethamin (SP) has been widely documented and directly responsible for an increase in malaria mortality in the past. The recent emergence of artemisinin resistance, the corner stone of the current treatment of artemisinin combination therapy is extremely worrying and should be treated as a major public health threat.

The first step to understanding and monitoring the scope of the problem is to get accurate and up-to-date data, in order to adequately guide treatment policies. But at the moment, this information is only partially available. We need to improve the way we collect and access to up to date information, and we need to strengthen the quality of that data. We have to cover regional gaps, and make sure that we all work to adequate standards. That is the main aim of WWARN – to collect the intelligence and make it available to everyone around the world in the malaria community.

2. That’s an ambitious aim. How are you going to do it?

It’s a major challenge, but I believe we can achieve it through building a comprehensive network of partners. In the first place, we need to reach all stakeholders.  We have to build links with researchers working in every country, in different languages, and with different means. We have to find out what tools will help researchers in their work. Our development is based on interaction with field researchers and will be driven by their needs.

3. What do you think are your main achievements so far?

We've launched the first of our web-based tools, WWARN Explorer. This tool is enabling data visualization in a very simple and interactive way. We have or are developing other tools, e.g. to calculate parasite clearance rate, in vivo study reporting template, in vitro statistical package… which will hopefully help investigators. We are also establishing regional centres in Asia last year and in East and West Africa this year. Those have delivered our first training programmes, and started to build up a bank of standardised Procedures on our website.

4. What are your longer term aims?

We need to reflect the fact that we are a community, with groups of researchers coming together in informal networks through WWARN. It's deeply embedded in our philosophy that we take a bottom up approach. We need to listen to what people are saying out in the field. For instance, what are the training needs of malaria researchers? How can the network help you?