MSF Scientific Days 2026: Research as a humanitarian responsibility

By guest contributor Ed Monk

The world is more expensive, more divided, and more in need than many of us can remember.

After more than a year of adapting to unprecedented funding cuts and a continued rise in geopolitical instability, 2026 has seen a further entrenching of humanitarian imbalance. This crisis is deepened not only by surging operational needs but also by globally escalating costs that impact the entire system, from operational delivery to daily living expenses.

During these challenging times, it is essential that humanitarian organisations strive to strengthen, evolve, and push back against this magnification of inequality. High-quality humanitarian health research, designed to improve the medical care and lives of marginalised populations who have been ignored by much of medical science to date, remains crucial.

“MSF works in an unfortunately privileged place…that presence brings a responsibility. If they don’t generate the evidence on how to treat these patients, very often no one else will…none of this should be a source of pride, it is a sign of a broken system.”

Sakib Burza, Health in Harmony

In May 2026, MSF UK hosted its 23^rd annual Scientific Days conference in London, a highlight of the wider association’s academic calendar. The event showcased world-leading research produced by MSF’s teams and collaborators while fostering debate on its role within shifting humanitarian and global health landscapes. MSF operates in areas that are highly vulnerable to conflict, natural disasters, and disease outbreaks. With this comes an inherent duty to utilise our academic expertise and generate patient-centred evidence to directly improve healthcare delivery to the populations we serve.

With over 2,350 attendees both in-person and online, and representation from almost 100 countries, MSF Scientific Days 2026 drew discussion from a diverse audience. The unified call for our research to be patient-centred was clear throughout the event – for it to include community, co-design, and choice. This was met with an intentional balance between qualitative and quantitative work across the day’s rich agenda. One clear example was the presentation of a peer-driven implementation project that explored the delivery of long-acting pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) to protect key populations from HIV in Beira, Mozambique. Similarly, the strength of mixed methods was demonstrated through a presentation of the Mombasa Youth and Key Pop study in Kenya, run in collaboration with the Mombasa County Department of Health, which aimed to evaluate and improve health access and well-being in adolescents throughout the city.

“Just sit with us. Hear our problems. Take them to people who will do something about it. And be sure they do something about it.”

Nell Gray, MSF, on behalf of the communities of Dar Sila, Chad

A particularly poignant reflection from the day that illustrated the vital importance of listening to local communities to shape our research came from an ethnographic study in Dar Sila, Chad. Initially aiming to report on the impact of climate change on health and humanitarian response in a multiphase, multi-site study, the team needed to pivot entirely once interviews began. A recent and devastating flood had led to a complete shift in local community priorities, after the sheer power of the water had carved irreversible changes into the terrain that made future flooding a regular certainty. As a result, an entire community was in mourning for its previous way of life – a sombre account of the real-world impacts of climate change that disproportionately affect already marginalised populations.

The agenda also integrated a number of examples of direct community engagement to design and implement clinical tools tailored to the populations that they serve. Key highlights included the implementation of an acute malnutrition decision support tool through a train-the-trainer programme within a cluster randomised controlled trial in Ngouri, Chad, as well as the development and rollout of an integrated newborn care kit in Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan. Dynamic surveillance platforms were also showcased, highlighting the implementation and impact of a rapid maternal death surveillance and response (R-MDSR) tool in South Darfur, Sudan, adapted by MSF teams from WHO-supported practices to better suit and support our work in volatile settings.

“We don’t want to make patients fit the tools. We want to make tools fit the patients…simplification alone is not necessarily the solution.”

Matthew Coldiron, MSF.

The day also provided an opportunity to platform recent works by MSF and their collaborators that stress-test scientific breakthroughs through real-world application.

The R21 malaria vaccine is a fantastic example of this. Recommended by the WHO since 2023, it can reduce malaria episodes by 75% in young children if given with high coverage across three primary doses with a booster after one year. This was an incredible milestone in the fight against malaria but leaves end-users with the question of how to implement R21 efficiently and equitably at scale. MSF teams presented novel approaches to providing the vaccine, incorporating delivery into not only the existing Expanded Programmes on Immunisation (EPI) but also seasonal malaria chemoprevention programmes across a multi-centre study based in Burkina Faso, Chad and Mali.

A further example came from MSF teams in Abdurafi, Ethiopia, who manage over 1,500 patients suffering from snakebite every year. PANAF-Premium is a polyvalent snakebite antivenom, designed to neutralise the venom of 25 snake species endemic to Africa and does not require refrigeration. However, despite being in production since 2015 and approved by WHO for use in Africa since 2023, there is very little real-world efficacy and safety data. This gap was addressed by MSF and collaborators through a prospective cohort study that evaluated the impact of PANAF-Premium in one of the highest burdened populations globally, and demonstrated it was highly effective and had minimal adverse reactions.

Following this, the AmbiOne study was presented that explored the implementation of single-dose liposomal amphotericin B for HIV-associated cryptococcal meningitis and its acceptability amongst healthcare providers in DRC, Guinea and Mozambique. Now recommended by the WHO as the preferred regimen, this study is important to assess the feasibility of a new gold standard in real-world settings. This is essential to ensure they hold up outside the scope of rigid, and often highly funded, clinical trials.

“Data: it’s about power, it’s about stewardship, it’s about trust, and it’s about justice…inadvertently we have become accidental stewards of humanitarian health data.”

Louisa Baxter, MSF

Research inherently embodies one of MSF’s key guiding principles: bearing witness or témoignage. Research is record – and there is power in data that is recorded well and presented with simplicity. A particularly striking illustration of this came from the event’s Keynote speaker Dr Masako Horino from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). Through rigorous, prospective recording of nutritional assessments from UNRWA facilities that functioned in Gaza between January 2024 and August 2025, UNRWA were able to report data from almost 220,000 children aged 6-59 months. Monthly snapshots showed clear trends that provided clear evidence for the declaration of famine according to IPC classification. This represented an incredible 64% of the entire population of Gaza within that age group.

MSF Scientific Days further demonstrated the power of research through testimony with two powerful reports that followed its keynote event. The first presented the retrospective record of traumatic injuries and their nature throughout the catastrophic conflict and humanitarian crisis in Gaza, with gunshot injuries increasing disproportionately from May 2025 in unison with the opening of food distribution sites. The second reported the trends of gender-based violence and the testimonies of survivors in Haiti over the last ten years, revealing not only an increasing rate, but also an increase in the brutality of the attacks.

“Who is better than MSF to do this? We exist in places where no one else goes…there is an obligation that we should use data to speak about what is going on in these places.“

Sohaib Safi, MSF

While the MSF Scientific Days conference provided an opportunity to acknowledge and celebrate a year of notable scientific achievements, strong academic collaboration, and growth in MSF’s collective research maturity, it also gave space for discussion, reflection and introspection. MSF is more than an accidental steward of data in hard places – as a movement we have the rare privilege of access and expertise. This positioning demands the deliberate and determined delivery of high-quality, patient-centred research designed to improve the medical care and lives of the populations we serve – it is an essential component of humanitarian work.

About the author:

Ed Monk is an infectious diseases and general internal medicine resident doctor from the United Kingdom and a trustee on the MSF UK board. He is currently based in The Gambia on a CREATE PhD programme fellowship, funded by the Wellcome Trust and hosted by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where he is investigating the transmission dynamics of Streptococcus pyogenes in primary school-aged children.

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