Dr. Tamiwe Tomoka is an anatomical pathologist. She leads the UNC Project Malawi Cancer Program and the Kamuzu Central Hospital (KCH) Pathology Laboratory, a collaboration between the Malawi Ministry of Health and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The laboratory is the sole provider of diagnostic pathology services to the northern and central regions of Malawi and serves approximately half of the 18 million population of Malawi. The laboratory also supports various cancer and non-cancer research projects. She was jointly appointed as adjunct faculty member of the University of Malawi College of Medicine (COM) and the University of North Carolina (UNC). She is a certified pathologist for NIH funded Aids Malignancy Consortium studies. She has experience in tissue diagnosis from various body sites with expertise in infectious and non-infectious diseases and cancer diagnosis
Her research interest is in HIV-associated malignancies and breast cancer, specifically molecular and genomic characterization of these cancers. She is currently the principal pathologist and laboratory collaborator in Malawi for KCH pediatric cancer studies, U54 CA190152 lymphoma cohort study, AMC 068 lymphoma, AMC 099 Kaposi sarcoma and AMC100 cervical cancer clinical trials, all supported by the NIH. In these studies, her roles include rendering primary diagnoses for all study cases, coordinating laboratory activities specific to the studies including organizing and participating in telepathology conferences with collaborators. Under her leadership, through our laboratory capacity building efforts specifically immunohistochemistry and telepathology, the UNC Malawi Project Cancer Program has been pioneer in the Sub Saharan Africa (SSA) region in recognizing and documenting rare and aggressive HIV and/or KSHV, EBV associated lymphoproliferative disorders including, plasmablastic lymphoma, extra cavitary primary effusion lymphoma, Multicentric Castleman disease (MCD) and extranodal natural killer T cell lymphoma (EBV but not HIV associated).
She is the first author, to our knowledge, of the first prospective description of MCD in Sub-Saharan Africa. In August 2019, she was awarded the AMC fellowship with support to study cell of origin subtypes and BCL2/MYC co-expression in HIV positive and HIV negative diffuse large B cell lymphomas. Through her leadership, we have demonstrated that through robust local and international collaborations, functional pathology laboratories that can support research are possible in resource-limited settings. She is also co-investigator for a genetic-epidemiological study on HPV genomics and cervical cancer in Malawi, a collaboration between UNC Project Malawi and the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics, NCI.
In addition to HIV associated cancers, she is principal investigator for a prospective observational breast cancer clinical cohort study in Lilongwe, and her interests are in the genomic and molecular characterization of breast cancer in SSA, In August 2019, she was awarded the UJMT Fogarty Global Health Fellowship to study gene expression profile of breast cancer in Malawian women.
