2: TechBio x Africa Manifesto: The Edge - part2 6679
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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