MAHE partners with NIAID TB portals program of NIH, USA

Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE) has partnered with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), National Institutes of Health (NIH) to become a member of the NIAID TB Portals program (See

Dr. Mahadev Rao, Professor and Head, Department of Pharmacy Practice initiated this program in Manipal and represents India in the Program's Steering committee. TB Portals is a web-based, open-access repository of socioeconomic/geographic, clinical, laboratory, radiological, and genomic data from mostly drug-resistant TB patient cases with linked physical samples.

The Office of Cyber Infrastructure and Computational Biology (OCICB) at the NIAID coordinates the TB Portals Program. The NIAID TB Portals Program is a multi-national collaboration for tuberculosis (TB) data sharing and analysis to advance TB research.

A consortium of clinicians and scientists from countries with a heavy burden of TB, especially drug-resistant TB, work together with data scientists and IT professionals to collect multi-domain TB data and make it available to the clinical and research communities (See: https://tbportals.niaid.nih.gov/Partners).

The Program has also built advanced analytical tools to perform both domain-specific and meta-domain analyses of TB Portals data. Country sites in Eastern Europe, Central and South Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa are sharing data through the Portals. Currently, the TB Portals Consortium includes 9 partnering countries including India.

Representatives from participating countries comprise the Program's Steering Committee, which provides feedback and guidance on the development of the TB Portals' resources, tools, and new research studies.

The data within the TB Portals have been collected and publicly shared by international partners in a direct partnership with the TB Portals Program.