A young adult clinic to support integration into adult sickle cell disease care: If you build it, they will come.

In high-income countries, individuals with sickle cell disease (SCD) almost universally survive into adulthood, but transfer to adult SCD care is fraught. The young adult clinic (YAC) at our sickle cell centre was designed to provide developmentally appropriate, expert SCD care to young adults with SCD aged 18-30 years. In this retrospective cohort study, we measured YAC appointment attendance and scheduling attempts based on patient referral source and demographic characteristics.

Organizing and running bioinformatics hackathons within Africa: The H3ABioNet cloud computing experience.

The need for portable and reproducible genomics analysis pipelines is growing globally as well as in Africa, especially with the growth of collaborative projects like the Human Health and Heredity in Africa Consortium (H3Africa). The Pan-African H3Africa Bioinformatics Network (H3ABioNet) recognized the need for portable, reproducible pipelines adapted to heterogeneous computing environments, and for the nurturing of technical expertise in workflow languages and containerization technologies. Building on the network's Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for common genomic analyses, H3ABioNet arranged its first Cloud Computing and Reproducible Workflows Hackathon in 2016, with the purpose of translating those SOPs into analysis pipelines able to run on heterogeneous computing environments and meeting the needs of H3Africa research projects.

Developing reproducible bioinformatics analysis workflows for heterogeneous computing environments to support African genomics.

Background: The Pan-African bioinformatics network, H3ABioNet, comprises 27 research institutions in 17 African countries. H3ABioNet is part of the Human Health and Heredity in Africa program (H3Africa), an African-led research consortium funded by the US National Institutes of Health and the UK Wellcome Trust, aimed at using genomics to study and improve the health of Africans. A key role of H3ABioNet is to support H3Africa projects by building bioinformatics infrastructure such as portable and reproducible bioinformatics workflows for use on heterogeneous African computing environments.