SEATTLE — When Dr. Corey Casper started looking for doctors to team up with for his work on Kaposi’s sarcoma, the medical researcher at the venerable Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center ran into a surprising statistic from the World Health Organization.

He learned that Uganda has one of the highest rates of this type of cancer in the world. In fact, cancer in general kills more people in sub-Saharan Africa than AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria combined, according to the WHO.

But unlike the United States, where Casper does his research on a beautiful campus filled with labs and doctors, Uganda at the time had one oncologist — for a nation of 30 million — at the tiny Uganda Cancer Institute in Kampala.

Uganda now has two more oncologists and two more in training at the Seattle cancer research center.

The centers are planning to announce this week that the U.S. Agency for International Development has awarded a $500,000 grant to help build a new cancer clinic and medical-training facility in Uganda. Two years ago, zero international dollars went to Uganda to treat its cancer patients, who number 10,000 a year.

Other medical specialists in the country are envious, said Dr. Fred Okuku, 37, who arrived in Seattle in September to begin a year of study at the Hutchinson Center.

Casper believes the training model can and will be duplicated by other institutions. Parallel efforts are beginning in Rwanda, with financial help from various organizations including the Lance Armstrong Foundation and the American Cancer Society.

Casper predicts the next step will be training oncologists to specialize.

Dr. Amos Mwaka, 35, who recently returned to Africa after a year studying in Seattle, is interested in training other medical workers to quickly identify cancer in their patients. One of the reasons so few patients survive the illness in Uganda is because early diagnosis is rare.

Mwaka tells the story of a man who was misdiagnosed and treated for tuberculosis three times. The doctors blamed the patient for his failure to recover. The fourth time he went to the clinic, a doctor did a biopsy and found cancer, but the man reached Kampala too late for effective treatment and died.

"If the doctor is not aware of how common cancer is, he will always make the diagnosis very late," Mwaka said. "There is a whole lot of time wasted in between as the cancer progresses."

Casper, who focuses his research on the link between infectious disease and cancer, points out another obstacle to cancer treatment in Uganda: HIV.

"At the cancer institute, 70 percent of patients are HIV-positive. They’re being relatively successfully treated for their HIV but they’re dying of cancer," he said.

The Hutchinson center has reached out to the U.S. international aid program — The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief — most involved in AIDS relief in Uganda to suggest that they work together to save lives.

Casper said his original goal to improve research in his cancer specialty already has been fulfilled.

In January, Casper and his Ugandan collaborators published a scientific paper on the herpes virus as an indicator for Kaposi’s sarcoma in a journal published by the Public Library of Science.