Precision medicine or personalized medicine is a cutting-edge innovation in healthcare delivery. It facilitates highly accurate detection, prevention, and treatment of diseases by considering each individual’s genetic makeup, lifestyle, ethnicity, family history, behavior, and environment. Currently, patients requiring blood transfusion are matched to blood samples of individuals with identical blood groups, which minimizes potential side effects and improves patient care outcomes. Imagine if this approach is extended to detect, prevent, and treat endemic ailments affecting Africans, such as malaria, tuberculosis, heart diseases, and diabetes, among others, for everyone.
Precision medicine ensures everyone gets tailored treatment based on their genetic, environmental, and lifestyle characteristics. It ensures each patient receives the right treatment at the right dose at the right time and improves patient health outcomes, minimizes one size fits all prescriptions, mitigates inaccurate diagnosis, reduces medical complications, and reduces health tourism from Africa and associated capital flight.
Africa is known to be the most genetically diverse continent, and several populations from other continents have genetic roots in Africa. However, only about 3% of global genomic data used in studies come from individuals of African heritage. Recent data shows this ratio has reduced further to about 1%, implying that Africans and their descendants may miss out on the benefits of genomic research, such as early detection of diseases and precise drug design.
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RevnaBio (https://revnabio.com/), a Tekedia Capital portfolio company, will be at the forefront of championing precision medicine in Africa through state-of-the-art biomedical research to uncover the biological constructs of diseases affecting Africans and people of African heritage. We are very proud of the promises of Revna Biosciences which will begin operations in Ghana this month to serve Africa. As soon as Ghana’s operation is stabilized, the Nigerian unit will be set up.
I thank all Tekedia Capital members who came bold to bring this promise to Africa. Here, we’re funding the foundations of the NEXT Africa and Revna will have catalytic impacts on our people, communities and continent. All members are invited to the opening ceremony in Accra.
*this post from a draft developed by a Tekedia Capital member
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