Nigeria’s capacity to generate essential genomic data for pharmaceutical productions that suit the medical needs of Africa’s genetic framework is gaining more impetus on investors’ growing interest in the development of local molecular medicine.
Apart from the business side of it, the investments are pushing the common goal of building a robust base of genetic resources that Nigeria and Africa in general have missed for decades.
The expansion of the required infrastructure is being spurred by the partnership between 54gene, Nigeria’s fast growing genomics firm, and Illuminia, an American company that manufactures and markets integrated systems for the analysis of genetic variation.
The facility to be domiciled in Lagos, Nigeria, for genetics mapping, is equipped with Illumina’s cutting-edge sequencing and high-density microarray technology platforms. Abasi Ene-Obong, founder/CEO of 54gene, is bringing to bear his understanding of the nuances of the local healthcare system and experience of sophisticated health markets in the US and Europe in ensuring that access to molecular diagnosis in real time is fostered.
The samples stored in 54gene’s de-identified biobank will be genotyped, sequenced and analysed within the country against the common trend of exporting samples for genomic sequencing.
In 2019, the CEO raised a $4.5 million seed round considered the biggest round for a Nigerian healthtech startup from Y Combinator, Fifty Years, Better Ventures and KdT Ventures.
His recent partnership only adds to a gradually growing list of investment interests in Nigeria’s genetic space.
Due to poor indigenous investment, Africa has largely been by-passed by scientific investigations mostly championed by Europeans, despite hosting a diverse lineage of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) – the element that determines the genetic makeup of human cells.
Earlier in the year, Christian Happi opened a $4 million genomics centre, African Centre of Excellence for Genomics of Infectious Diseases (ACEGID), at the Redeemers University.
The health infrastructure mainly funded by the World Bank produced the first Africa’s genome sequencing of COVID-19 within 72 hours, a time-frame considered the fastest in the world compared to China and some European countries. The detail of the mapping was immediately made available to the scientific community. Happi, one of Africa’s leading scientists trained at Harvard, was part of the team that sequenced Ebola during the outbreak.
While Ene-Obong’s approach is to collect 100,000 data samples by the end of 2020, possibly to start piloting clinical trials with pharmaceutical partners, Happi’s interest is in digging up more genetic information and throwing them at the behest of pharmaceutical companies in need of local resource.
Although Happi is equally engaged offering consulting services to parastatals of government and the private sector. The coming on stream of additional players, Happi told BusinessDay, will bolster molecular medicine in Nigeria.
“We were not really interested in terms of storing the samples or keeping the samples or making the fancy nature or science paper. And that’s what’s different between us that are on the ground and care about our people, and those that are called ‘parachute scientists,” he further said in a Financial Times report seen by BusinessDay.
Also, Charles Rotimi, senior researcher at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and a Nigerian, had cleared the early path for African genomics research by taking it as a scientific necessity and a subject of social justice.
As of 2018, 78 percent of individuals included in genome-wide studies looking for genetic variations associated with disease were European. Only 2 percent of individuals were African, 1 percent Hispanic, 10 percent Asian, and all other ethnic groups were represented by less than 1 percent of individuals.
The amount of genetic difference among human populations is very small, but it may only take one genetic variant or mutation to increase or decrease the risk of disease, said epidemiologist Scott Williams from Case Western University in a report.
Seeing the potential untapped in Africa, Rotimi in 2012 created the H3Africa programme, an initiative funded by the NIH and the UK’s Wellcome Trust.
Under it, a consortium of roughly 500 African scientists is conducting ground-breaking research on the genetic causes of blindness, Alzheimer’s, cancer, kidney disease and other diseases.
“The scientific imperative is that there are things in the human genome that we cannot study anywhere else but on the African continent, because of the evolutionary history of humanity,” he said. “The social justice issue is that if we don’t engage this part of the world, then whatever gains we are going to get from using genomics to improve health or agriculture or even the economy, that part of the world is going to be left behind, just like a lot of other revolutions passed over Africa.”
Similarly, Olufunmilayo Olopade, another Nigerian who is one of America’s leading cancer researchers, years ago began noticing higher rates of breast cancer at earlier ages in women in Nigeria.
In 2018, she co-authored the first-ever study to use sophisticated genomics analysis of African women. The results shifted the understanding of how breast cancer would develop and how it should be screened regardless of origin.
“For a very long time, we have thought that cancer went through a systematic, slow growth, so you wait until 50 and you get your mammogram once every two years and you’re going to be OK,” said Olopade, a MacArthur genius grantee and director of the Centre for Clinical Cancer Genetics and Global Health at the University of Chicago, in a March 2020 Financial Times report.
“I think this really has just turned that on its head, because you may need to start earlier. And it shows that we need to do more genetic research in Africa, otherwise we will have the wrong policies, we will start in the wrong place, and that’s why we have not had the kind of progress we needed to have.”
The Nigeria Institute of Medical Research (NIMR) has been filling the gap in this area in the public sector, but it can be merrier with more players.
