Starting operations in January 2017, Qatar University has announced the launch of a new Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Research unit under QU health intending to create a dynamic and diverse environment that embraces qualified experts in professional health care education and practice.

College of Medicine, College of Pharmacy, College of Health Sciences and the recently established College of Dental Health are also included in QU health.

The Research Unit aims to bring together researchers from several colleges and forming research teams that share resources and infrastructure. The global research landscape is constantly evolving, resulting in the adoption of a theme-based interdisciplinary structure in universities, allowing researching with common goals and interests to collaborate and share resources.

It has been recognised that there is a need for a research strategy, strongly promoting interdisciplinary research for the optimum use of resources, maximizing research/education output and establishing a platform that fosters academic success.

The Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Research Unit (BPRU) has stressed on the establishment of interdisciplinary disease based graduate programs concerning Qatar National priorities, as part of their educational strategy.

Moreover, the interdisciplinary disease-approached research with a “problem and solution-based approach” adopted by this unit will aim to address Qatar’s grand health challenges with the ultimate goal to support the country’s efforts to advance health care.

The research thematic areas of BPRU have been strategically selected based on the research strengths and capacities that QU currently possesses. BPRU aims to focus on research addressing the grand challenges that Qatar’s health sector is currently facing. Hence, BPRU research will focus on the following mains themes of biomedical & pharmaceutical research; Cancer, Diabetes and Metabolic Disorders, Cardiovascular Diseases, Infectious Diseases and Reproductive Medicine. Additionally, Drug discovery and development has been identified as an important research area.

According to Dr Michail Nomikos, Head of research and Graduate Studies at the College of Medicine and Acting Head of the BPRU, the establishment of this unit took almost a year of preparations and would not be possible without the help of many individuals. Moreover, they are currently trying to rapidly expand and secure more funding for BPRU unit, fostering impactful and meaningful quality research.

The Vice President for Medical and Health Sciences, Dr Egon Toft said, “with this initiative, we have the ambition to drive the basic medical sciences research to a higher level in the country and be a strong collaborative pillar to do this in collaboration with the other institutions doing basic medical research in Qatar”.

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