COMRU Cambodia (MORU network)

Located within Angkor Hospital for Children (AHC), Siem Reap, the Cambodia-Oxford Medical Research Unit (COMRU) is led by paediatric clinical microbiologist Paul Turner and paediatrician Claudia Turner. The MORU-AHC collaboration began in 2006 and was formalised as COMRU in 2012, with the unit becoming fully embedded as a hospital department in 2018.

Working within the broad themes of infectious disease epidemiology and newborn survival, COMRU has undertaken detailed febrile illness aetiology studies, pathogen-specific studies for key species (community and hospital colonisation: Escherichia coli, Klebsiella pneumoniae; epidemiology, clinical features, outcomes: Burkholderia pseudomallei, Salmonella Typhi, Staphylococcus aureus; colonisation and vaccine impact: Streptococcus pneumoniae), and health system wide work to determine neonatal mortality in rural northern Cambodia.

International collaborations have centred on global pathogen genomic surveillance work. COMRU has provided most of the Cambodian strains for Streptococcus pneumoniae (Global Pneumococcal Sequencing project) and Salmonella Typhi (International Typhoid Consortium / TyphiNET). Current collaborations have expanded the organism scope to include important AMR relevant species (Escherichia coli and Klebsiella pneumoniae), and potentially vaccine preventable infections (non-typeable Haemophilus influenzae).

Recent COMRU studies have focused on identifying interventions to improve newborn survival, and on improving access to treatment for sepsis / febrile illness. Local antimicrobial resistance (AMR) surveillance work at AHC-COMRU informed the development and implementation of the Wellcome-funded ACORN international AMR surveillance project.