BJMC (India)
BJMC is among the top ten medical schools in India. It has 200 new medical students, 130 residents every year and more than 200 teaching faculty in all major medical and surgical specialties (medicine, surgery, orthopedics, ophthalmology, ENT, nephrology, endocrinology, plastic surgery, pediatrics, obstetrics and gynecology and solid organ transplantation). It also has a nursing school with 50 new nursing students each year. The Medical College is affiliated with the Sassoon General Hospital (SGH), a 1450-bed tertiary-care public hospital which cares for >525,000 outpatients and >60,000 inpatients annually, serving an urban catchment area of 4 million people. It has a center for HIV antiretroviral treatment (ART) run by the National AIDS Control Organization and currently has over 15,000 registered HIV patients. It also has a Indian government Revised National TB Control Program (RNTCP) center where over 4,000 patients are evaluated for TB each year. The OBGYN department caters to over 6,000 pregnant women annually and performs 8,000 deliveries.
Laboratory Facilities
The BJMC CRS lab has established laboratory infrastructure for CTU studies. It has the capacity to perform more than 30 lab analyses required by the NIH trials networks. All protocol-related lab activities (sample receiving, processing, Laboratory Data Management Systems (LDMS) entry, specimen storage, haematology, chemistry, serology, CD4, viral load, HBV, Vitamin D testing, etc.) are performed at the central CRS lab. The lab is also performing processing for specialty immunological assays and can store samples if required.
Appropriate temperature monitoring system and electricity backup are installed. The site has also set up PBMC processing (filtration unit with suction pump, chemicals, reagents and liquid nitrogen storage are available) and is IQA certified for PBMC cryopreservation. The laboratory also performs interferon gamma release assays (IGRA) such as Quantiferon Gold in tube assay (QGIT) and Cytometric bead array (CBA) assays.