Within just 60 minutes of Dr Anita Ghansah’s keynote presentation at the inaugural conference of the Public Health Alliance for Genomic Epidemiology (PHA4GE) being held in Cape Town this week, an alarming 60 children under the age of five will have died from malaria in sub-Saharan Africa.
Dr Ghansah, a senior research fellow in the parasitology department of the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research, University of Ghana, was making a case for the greater adoption of genomics and bioinformatics – respectively, the study of an organism’s genetic make-up and the computational tools to analyse genomic data – in public health in Africa. She said malaria could be considered a “delayed case” for the use of these disciplines.
While genetic sequencing has become commonplace for diseases such as tuberculosis, HIV and especially COVID-19, where it has aided the development of everything from diagnostic tools to vaccines and drugs, malaria has up to now not received the same attention.
This is in part, she argued, because sub-Saharan Africa accounts for some 90% of the more than half a million deaths – 627,000 in 2021 alone, according to estimates by the World Health Organisation (WHO) – caused by malaria every year. Children under the age of five bear the disproportionate burden of the disease.
“Unlike COVID-19, you cannot compare the speed and urgency of the global approach,” said Ghansah.
That also has to do with the complexity of malaria itself, she clarified. The unabated spread of the disease is the result of both the Anopheles mosquitoes responsible for the spread of the disease, and the varied malaria parasites developing resistance to the products and drugs designed to fight them. In addition, the response of the human host further complicates efforts to contain the disease. But the genomic capacity put in place over the COVID-19 pandemic can now be put to use in efforts to combat malaria, as Ghana has sought to do through its National Malaria Control Programme, for example, explained Ghansah. But Africa has some way to go before it can fully harness the potential of genomics, she added.
Too often academics and others labour in silos, and data is not shared – or simply cannot be shared because data systems can’t speak to each other.
“What we need is to build a holistic ecosystem,” said Dr Ghansah. “We need to standardise our standards and processes. We need harmonised processes.”
This echoes with the mission statement of PHA4GE, a global coalition of some 200 scientists, technologists and public health experts dedicated to developing shared standards and tools for applying genomics in public health.
The immediate focus is on the sequencing of disease-causing pathogens, as explained by Professor Alan Christoffels of the South African National Bioinformatics Institute (SANBI) at the University of the Western Cape (UWC), who also chairs the PHA4GE steering committee. With this in mind, the priority of PHA4GE and the conference is on fostering innovation in global efforts to curb the spread of infectious disease, both in Africa and the world beyond.
“PHA4GE was started in 2019 with the aim of bringing together an interdisciplinary team in order to innovate in the public health space,” said Prof Christoffels. “And we’ve certainly found that the diversity in expertise, in academia, as well as in public health and in the private sector, provides the ideal space to deal with the continent’s health crises.”
Over 150 delegates are attending the PHA4GE conference, taking place at the Cavilli Estate, Somerset West, from 30 October to 1 November 2023.
Dr Ghansah, a senior research fellow in the parasitology department of the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research, University of Ghana, was making a case for the greater adoption of genomics and bioinformatics – respectively, the study of an organism’s genetic make-up and the computational tools to analyse genomic data – in public health in Africa. She said malaria could be considered a “delayed case” for the use of these disciplines.
While genetic sequencing has become commonplace for diseases such as tuberculosis, HIV and especially COVID-19, where it has aided the development of everything from diagnostic tools to vaccines and drugs, malaria has up to now not received the same attention.
This is in part, she argued, because sub-Saharan Africa accounts for some 90% of the more than half a million deaths – 627,000 in 2021 alone, according to estimates by the World Health Organisation (WHO) – caused by malaria every year. Children under the age of five bear the disproportionate burden of the disease.
“Unlike COVID-19, you cannot compare the speed and urgency of the global approach,” said Ghansah.
That also has to do with the complexity of malaria itself, she clarified. The unabated spread of the disease is the result of both the Anopheles mosquitoes responsible for the spread of the disease, and the varied malaria parasites developing resistance to the products and drugs designed to fight them. In addition, the response of the human host further complicates efforts to contain the disease. But the genomic capacity put in place over the COVID-19 pandemic can now be put to use in efforts to combat malaria, as Ghana has sought to do through its National Malaria Control Programme, for example, explained Ghansah. But Africa has some way to go before it can fully harness the potential of genomics, she added.
Too often academics and others labour in silos, and data is not shared – or simply cannot be shared because data systems can’t speak to each other.
“What we need is to build a holistic ecosystem,” said Dr Ghansah. “We need to standardise our standards and processes. We need harmonised processes.”
This echoes with the mission statement of PHA4GE, a global coalition of some 200 scientists, technologists and public health experts dedicated to developing shared standards and tools for applying genomics in public health.
The immediate focus is on the sequencing of disease-causing pathogens, as explained by Professor Alan Christoffels of the South African National Bioinformatics Institute (SANBI) at the University of the Western Cape (UWC), who also chairs the PHA4GE steering committee. With this in mind, the priority of PHA4GE and the conference is on fostering innovation in global efforts to curb the spread of infectious disease, both in Africa and the world beyond.
“PHA4GE was started in 2019 with the aim of bringing together an interdisciplinary team in order to innovate in the public health space,” said Prof Christoffels. “And we’ve certainly found that the diversity in expertise, in academia, as well as in public health and in the private sector, provides the ideal space to deal with the continent’s health crises.”
Over 150 delegates are attending the PHA4GE conference, taking place at the Cavilli Estate, Somerset West, from 30 October to 1 November 2023.
