At the Cape Town conference, we hear that plans are underway for the African Bioinformatics Institute to manage the deluge of data.
The boom in genomics and other “omics” research in Africa is generating huge amounts of data that need to be managed, it was reported at the conference this week.
This has led to proposals for a data analytics infrastructure initiative that would extend the benefits of data beyond the lifetime of the project that collected it.
Federated Network
One such initiative is the African Bioinformatics Institute, which aims to build a federated network of computational biologists and data scientists across Africa.
The ABI will build on H3ABioNet, a pan-African bioinformatics network built under the Human Genetics and Health in Africa program, which supported genomic research in Africa from 2012 to 2022.
H3ABioNet’s funding will run out within five weeks, H3ABioNet leader Nicola Mulder said at the African Population Cohort Consortium’s planning launch conference, held May 27-28 in Cape Town, South Africa.
APCC aims to network and strengthen dozens of African population cohorts tracking millions of Africans, and use the data to help solve the continent’s health problems.
Mulder, who heads the computational biology department at the University of Cape Town, said the ABI would support projects like APCC with its big data skills.
“The idea is that we’ll build it and then people can use it for their individual projects,” she said.
But with funding for the ABI yet to be secured, it remains “an ideal, a dream that we would like to realise”, Mulder told a gathering of representatives of 45 population study cohorts from 15 African countries.
Africa Biobank
Another proposal being developed as part of the APCC, which has not yet been funded, is the establishment of a continental biobank to help researchers conduct studies across Africa’s diverse populations.
Africans are the most genetically diverse people in the world, geneticist Michelle Ramsay told the conference, but their genomes are also the least studied.
APCC’s Biobank project will collect biological samples from 10,000 individuals from 25 different African population study cohorts across 15 African countries.
The biobank will help African researchers better understand the health status across the continent, calculate the prevalence of current diseases of concern, and provide a baseline for long-term studies.
However, given the diversity of biobanking and data protection laws across the continent, the project poses many challenges in terms of managing data and samples, the conference was informed.
“I think it’s doable,” says Ramsay, who is based at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. The result, she adds, would be an “incredibly comprehensive database” unlike anything that currently exists in Africa.
