Established in 1979 as a research collaboration between Thailand’s Mahidol University and the UK’s University of Oxford and Wellcome, the Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit (MORU) and its Departments, laboratories and Operations & Admin are headquartered in Bangkok, Thailand within Mahidol’s Faculty of Tropical Medicine.

Their discipline-specific departments and laboratories in Bangkok and elsewhere work closely with all of their MORU Units and study sites, as well as with the national malaria control programmes and ministries of health in countries across South East Asia and the tropics. This enables them to explore heterogeneity in the causes of infec­tious diseases and allows them to conduct adequately powered multicentre clinical trials, ensuring the generalizability of results. In the field of drug repurposing specifically, they conduct adaptive Phase 2 platform trials to assess the antiviral efficacy of repurposed drugs against pandemic threats, such as influenza.