It is no hyperbole to suggest that the Africa Pathogen Genomics Initiative (Africa PGI) Data Management and Exchange Platform is an ambitious exercise.

Delegates from around Africa gathered at SANBI to fine-tune the user experience on an continent-wide pathogen database being developed by the Africa Pathogen Genomics Initiative.

For one thing, is it imagined as a virtual repository where genomic sequencing data on disease-causing pathogens from around Africa are stored, the first of its kind on the continent. In that regard alone the platform will go toe-to-toe with celebrated and widely adopted international databases such as the German-based Global Initiative on Sharing Avian Influenza Data (GISAID) and the Sanger Institute Pathogen Genomics Database (GeneDB).

Much more than just a database, however, the – an initiative of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) – will give users access to the kind of scarce-in-Africa bioinformatics tools that will allow researchers to run critical analyses of the data on the platform itself. It will tell them exactly what kind of virus or bacterium they’re dealing with, and how, when, and where it is evolving.

This access will, in the words of Professor Alan Christoffels, Director of the South African National Bioinformatics Institute (SANBI) at the University of the Western Cape and senior advisor to the Africa PGI, “foster the kind of collaboration that we desperately need to fight disease outbreaks in Africa”.

But one easy-to-overlook weak spot in the potential uptake of such databases is how user-friendly it is. “If a user struggles to upload the data or it takes too many steps to do so, they will simply stop using it and go elsewhere,” said Prof Christoffels. “It’s that simple.”

This is why SANBI staff working on the development of the platform hosted a week-long user-group consultative workshop with potential users at the end of March. Over three days, some 18 participants, representing public health laboratories across several African countries, gave the user interface a thorough working over. They covered everything from persona identification – how users sign up and are verified – to how data would be uploaded and utilised on the database.

“Workshops which focus on user-centric design of data platforms provide valuable information and insights into how the end-user expects to interact with the front-end,” says Dr Dominique Anderson, senior researcher at SANBI who ran the workshop. “This allows us to understand end-user requirements and expectations, building functionality according to need and makes the platform truly pan-African.”

The workshop sits at the latter end of the development process that started with a continental technical working group that over 2022 outlined a vision for the platform. It is expected that a prototype will be launched at the end of May this year.

Prof Christoffels has already recently submitted a paper on the need for and the development of such a database to ‘Nature Medicine’, making a case for why Africa needs its own such platform. The paper is expected to be published shortly.