Love!
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Love!
(Inspired by Jalal Eddine Rumi)
Love is destiny.
We hardly ever choose the moment to love;
It happens one evening… or one morning.
It comes by pure chance,
Leaving you confused and dazed.
The day you expect it the least,
You never saw it coming from afar.
It strikes in the blink of an eye,
Without an appointment,
It makes you gentle,
It makes you lose your reason.
It makes you flee your home.
Like fire, it burns with passion.
Love at first sight is common—
Each will have their share, their portion.
Without logic…
Yet it’s beautiful, despite all we endure.
It’s a pure feeling,
When it is sincere.
It’s magic,
It’s fantastic.
Despite its pains and sorrows,
Its sleepless nights until dawn,
It is life’s elixir,
Ecstasy without end.
It comes to you as if by magic,
Lifting you away from everything,
Besieging you from everywhere,
Taking over your soul…
And driving you mad, sooner or later!
Dr. Fouad Bouchareb
El Médano / Tenerife
August 24, 2025
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[Short Stories #4 ] A Red Flower Among the Ice [2/3]
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The door creaked open softly, and she paused, turning back just long enough to catch his eyes, a fleeting moment charged with unspoken meaning. She watched him carefully, her expression a blend of surprise and gentle curiosity, then spoke with quiet tenderness, “What do you hold in your hands, Karl?”
He raised his small hand slowly, revealing a vivid red flower resting softly against his palm. “Look,” he said, his smile tender and warm, “it’s a beautiful red flower.” Lila reached out, her hands cupping the delicate bloom as if shielding a fragile flame, her warmth seeming to ignite the fiery petals.
Karl’s voice trembled a little when he said, “It’s for you.”
Lila lowered her head, her eyes searching his, heavy with a sadness too deep for words. “What’s wrong?” she whispered.
His gaze dropped to the floor, as though the weight of his next words could only be carried there. “The military… they’re sending me away, to the far north. For a whole year. And I can’t take you with me.”
Her voice wavered, trying to stay steady, but a soft sigh escaped. “Come, Karl. Let’s plant it in our garden.”
With quick steps, Lila led the way outside, carrying the flower gently in her hands. Karl followed behind, his steps slow and hesitant. They stopped in the center of the garden, where a bare patch of earth waited beneath the pale sunlight.
Kneeling, Lila loosened the cold soil with her fingers as carefully as if touching a newborn’s skin. She placed the flower into its new home and pressed the earth softly around its roots. Then, with a small watering can, she poured cool droplets like a quiet blessing, nurturing the flicker of life buried deep in the soil.
Karl stood still, watching her with quiet eyes. Then, with a faint smile, he said, “It looks even more beautiful now. You’ve given it new life.”
Brushing her fingertips across the shining petals, Lila whispered, “My flower and I will wait for you, no matter how long it takes.”
Karl’s promise was soft but certain. “I’ll come back as soon as I can.”
Later, the car door closed with a gentle thud. Karl climbed inside and began his journey northward, the world outside growing smaller with every mile. Lila watched until the car was nothing more than a fading speck on the horizon. Then she turned back, closing the door behind her.
Day after day, spring after spring, the roots of the red flower stretched deep into the earth, holding tightly to the soil, keeping the promise alive. The winters were harsh, cold biting against both flower and keeper. Though every effort was made to keep it alive, the warm hands that planted the blossom grew cold in time, but still the flower endured.
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The Neighbor of the Valley
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The Neighbor of the Valley
(Inspired by the song of Fairouz — “Ya Jarat al-Wadi”)
O neighbor of the valley, O joy,
O turmoil of my soul,
Your memories and dreams haunt me still,
Calling me, claiming my whole.
In my dreams as in my waking mind,
Your love remains, ever near;
And the memories softly resound,
Echoes of a past still clear.
I passed again by the gardens,
So green, so full of life —
There where I once met you,
Upon that sunlit hill.
Faces and eyes smiled upon me,
And in their breath I sensed your scent.
My weary soul revived at once,
She who had mourned her fate
Since the day you went.
Never before had I known
The sweetness of a lover’s embrace,
Until the day I gently held you close —
You, the red-haired grace,
Whose supple form bent softly in my hands,
Like a slender branch swayed by the breeze,
And whose cheeks, out of modesty,
Blushed with tender unease.
The language of words fell silent then,
Yielding to the speech of eyes;
Mine spoke to yours
With the passion love implies.
The stars and the heavens, our only allies,
Bore witness to us before the skies.
And when night came, I held you again,
Caressed and kissed you
Until the breaking of dawn —
Before we drifted apart, forlorn.
Since that day, there has been no yesterday,
No tomorrow, no day after,
No time thereafter.
The flow of time has ceased forever,
And was condensed into that one day —
The day I basked in all your favor.
Dr Fouad Bouchareb
Rabat, October 11, 2025
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Techbio x Africa: Early Movers - part3
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Early Signs, Real Ventures
It's one thing to say the infrastructure and talent are here but the real test is whether it yields actual companies.
And the signs are already showing. A new class of TechBios is taking shape, raising money, and doing the first thing every good TechBio does:
… drum roll, you should know it by now…
Building proprietary datasets.
The support system is forming too. OneBio, a Cape Town venture studio, closed a $47M Series A to back founders at the biology–technology edge.
Villgro Africa in Nairobi has already incubated 40+ health and life science startups and unlocked $18M in follow-on capital. These are strides stimulate the Techbio ecosystem and in part, to close Africa's translation gap with venture tools.
And the startups coming out of this wave are telling. I thought I would share my personal pick here. Start-ups I can map on the playbook trajectory.
Yemaachi Biotech in Ghana raised $3M from YC, Tencent, and LoftyInc to build the world's most diverse cancer knowledge base, sequencing samples across the continent to power precision oncology. As founder Yaw Bediako put it:
"We're looking at trying to understand cancer in the African diaspora - African American, Black British, and continental Africans - the first initiative of its scale. You can't say you're studying a disease if you don't include the most diverse population on the planet, which is the Black population."
BioCertica in South Africa, backed by Pronexus and the Gates Foundation's I3 program with a $2.2M seed, runs consumer genetic tests but is really playing the long game of building the first African polygenic risk database.
And Bixbio, part of OneBio's portfolio and an Illumina Accelerator graduate, assembled the largest reference dataset ever from Southern Africa, nearly 400 high-quality genomes across eight ethno-linguistic groups.
Even newcomers like Pandora Biosciences are starting on the same path, building chronic disease datasets designed for drug discovery.
And just this summer, the signal got even stronger. In June 2025, Revna Biosciences, a Ghanaian precision medicine startup, announced a landmark partnership with AstraZeneca. Within months, EGFR (gene coding for cell growth protein) biomarker testing integrated into Ghanaian cancer centers, oncologists trained in precision protocols, and the rollout of one of AstraZeneca's targeted therapies for lung cancer patients.
For a sub-Saharan market that has historically had near-zero access to this kind of precision oncology, that's nothing short of historic.
As Revna's CEO Dr. Derrick Edem Akpalu put it:
"This collaboration exemplifies how a synergized biomedical ecosystem such as RevnaBio's can help address long-standing institutional voids that have limited access to advanced molecular diagnostics and targeted therapies in this region."
It's a textbook case of a TechBio going from data and diagnostics to being a direct bridge for global Pharma into Africa.
None of this is random. Data-first plays are the starting point of TechBio always.
In the West, consumer genomics followed the same arc: 23andMe built a database of 15M genomes, went bankrupt, and still got snapped up in 2025 by Regeneron for $256M because Pharma wanted the dataset.
Tempus, sitting on 20 petabytes of oncology data, signed a $160M licensing deal with Recursion to train AI models for biomarker discovery and patient stratification.
The lesson is obvious: even before a molecule is in sight, the data itself is valuable enough to Pharma. Africa's first TechBios are now running that playbook and they're doing it from the most diverse human dataset on the planet.
The Stakes for Africa x TechBio
Case Study: 54gene - The Right Start, The Wrong Turn
54gene was supposed to be Africa’s genomics moonshot. Founded in 2019 by Dr. Abasi Ene-Obong, the company set out to fix the glaring gap where less than 3% of global genomic data came from Africans despite the continent holding the greatest genetic diversity on earth. Backed by Y Combinator, Adjuvant Capital, and Cathay AfricInvest, it raised $45M across three rounds and quickly became the poster child for African TechBio.
The model at first was exactly what you’d expect from a good TechBio: start with the data. 54gene partnered with 10 of Nigeria’s largest hospitals, built a biobank that grew past 100,000 patient samples, and focused on high-value cohorts like cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and sickle cell.
This was the right first play: position as an enabler for hospitals and research centers, pile up proprietary datasets, and generate revenue through paid Pharma collaborations. In other words, service-led first, platform-led later — the same arc followed by U.S. genomics pioneers like 23andMe.
Then came COVID. 54gene pivoted into diagnostics, scaling mobile labs and at one point driving Nigeria’s daily testing capacity from 100 to over 1,000. Revenues spiked — over $20M from COVID testing — but the pivot also pulled the company away from its core playbook. Instead of doubling down on turning its biobank into translational insights with AI, it spun up Seven Rivers Labs, a costly diagnostics arm. The bets didn’t pay off.
By 2022, as COVID demand collapsed, 54gene was caught between a fading diagnostics business and a stalled genomics mission. Layoffs, valuation cuts, and boardroom fights followed. In 2023 the company shut down operations; by 2025, its assets, including the biobank of 100,000 Nigerian genomes were up for sale at just $3M, before a Lagos court froze the deal amid lawsuits between founder and investors.
The story matters because it shows how fragile the trajectory can be.
Imagine if instead of diagnostics, 54gene had invested its datasets into AI models to map dosage differences for African populations, identify new drug targets, or partner on stratified clinical trials. That’s the road from platform to assets, the road that makes a TechBio a unicorn.
Dr. Ene-Obong seems to agree. His new company, Syndicate Bio, is now doubling down on the same thesis but with AI built in from day one partnering on cancer genomics in Nigeria and aiming to turn Africa’s diversity into global drug discovery.
It’s the continuation of the playbook 54gene set in motion, but with the missing piece restored.
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TechBio x Africa Manifesto: The Edge - part2
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In Africa The Bottleneck Was Always Here And Now There a Real drivers for change
Translation is now recognized as the great bottleneck of drug discovery worldwide. But in Africa, it has always been the bottleneck.
Not in developing drugs, but in applying them.
Most medicines were discovered and validated elsewhere, then imported with little understanding of how African populations would metabolize or respond to them. The result is a structural mismatch: Africa accounts for 18% of the global population and 20% of the disease burden, yet fewer than 3% of clinical trials take place on the continent, most of them concentrated in South Africa and Egypt.
This gap is not trivial. Drug absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion (the ADME framework) are heavily influenced by genetic variants, especially in liver enzymes like CYP-450, which remain poorly characterized in African populations.
In theory, Africa's extraordinary genetic diversity should have been a global advantage for understanding variability in drug safety and efficacy. In practice, it was ignored.
As Professor Kelly Chibale of the University of Cape Town has argued:
"If you really want to have confidence in a clinical trial, it must start in Africa. Why? If it works in Africa, there's a good chance it'll work somewhere else, because there is such huge genetic diversity."
Then came COVID-19. The pandemic was a turning point, mobilizing governmental, NGO, and international funding to build sequencing labs, train scientists, and set up data infrastructure.
In my opinion, the Africa Pathogen Genomics Initiative (Africa PGI) became emblematic of this shift.
The first 10,000 SARS-CoV-2 genomes from Africa took 375 days; the next 10,000 just 87 days; the following 10,000 only 24 days. Today, all 54 African countries have sequencing capacity, and African scientists identified two of the world's five variants of concern.
For the first time, Africa showed it could operate at global pace when given the tools.
These investments were catalytic and revealed what had long been latent:
Africa is not just a recipient of medicines but a potential engine of translational science.
The infrastructure layer, built with public and philanthropic support (like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation), is now enabling a broader ecosystem: regulatory frameworks like the Africa CDC and the African Medicines Agency, scientific hubs such as H3D in Cape Town, and new hardware capacity supported by corporates like Thermo Fisher's Centre for Innovative Research in South Africa.
From here, the snowball is rolling. What began with genomics is already extending across the translational stack. In Ghana, new medicinal chemistry capacity has positioned the country as only the second on the continent (after South Africa) able to run early-stage compound design, linked into the pan-African Drug Discovery Accelerator.
This is big, because the continent can now de-risk potential assets.
Pharma is of course watching closely. Roche's African Genomics Program is sequencing tens of thousands of African genomes through local biobanks. Sanofi's partnership with DNDi shows how compounds de-risked in Africa can enter global pipelines.
And demographics strengthen the logic: Africa's population is set to nearly double by 2050, while non-communicable diseases like diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer will become leading causes of death by 2030 which is the same conditions driving Pharma pipelines worldwide.
The Continent Is Full Of Bright Tech Minds
But data infrastructure alone is not enough; translation also depends on whether there is talent capable of making sense of the data.
COVID revealed this too: it was an African-born (Tunisia) AI company, InstaDeep, that helped BioNTech build the Early Warning System able to flag >90% of WHO-designated SARS-CoV-2 variants an average of two months before their official classification.
The company had already been working with BioNTech on personalized cancer vaccines, and post-acquisition it continues to run as an independent AI lab powering BioNTech's drug discovery, improving AlphaFold-like protein folding in immunology to designing next-generation mRNA cancer vaccines.
The $700 million acquisition in 2023 was not only the largest AI deal outside the U.S. at the time, but also a watershed moment for the continent. As co-founder Karim Beguir put it in a recent podcast interview:
"our initial motive was to prove that young Tunisians, young Africans could innovate and compete at the highest level"
The significance goes beyond one company.
It validated Africa's AI talent density, which is being built from the ground up through grassroots, community-led efforts. Initiatives like Masakhane, a volunteer-driven movement advancing natural language processing for African languages, or Deep Learning Indaba, cited globally as a model for how to mobilize a continent around machine learning, are emblematic of this bottom-up energy.
I saw it myself at Applied Machine Learning Days Africa 2024 in Nairobi, where more than 3,000 participants gathered across three days mostly researchers, innovators, and students taking responsibility for local problems and showing how AI can answer them.
This effort-led culture is now being matched with hardware too infrastructure. Microsoft has launched its first Azure cloud region in South Africa, enabling GPU-grade compute to stay on the continent, while Nvidia and Cassava are building an AI factory in Johannesburg, with expansions planned for Kenya, Egypt, Morocco, and Nigeria.
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