EU and Africa unveil joint plan to boost personalised medicine

Four-year project to investigate gaps has come up with collaborative ways to solve them

A new action plan aims to transform healthcare in Africa and Europe by fostering collaboration between the two continents in personalised medicine.

The EU-Africa PerMed Action Plan aims to build new biobanks and genomic hubs for the continent, and create collaborative networks to share resources between Africa and Europe.

It’s the fruit of a four-year project funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 funding programme involving 13 partners—six in Europe and seven in Africa.

The project began in 2021 with an exploration of potential advantages to collaborations in personalised medicine between Africa and Europe.

Tailored treatments

Personalised medicine is when medical treatment are tailored to an individual’s unique genetic, environmental and lifestyle factors. It is more common in wealthy countries, partly due to cost but also because most genomic studies have focused on people of European descent. 

The project found that, while there has been an increase in personalised medicine in Africa—with South Africa and Egypt leading the pack—the continent also has gaps in infrastructure, bioinformatics and genomic data repositories.

The plan, which was formally launched in November, aims to fill these gaps and to improve diagnostics, treatments and disease prevention strategies on both continents by integrating expertise across Europe and Africa.

While the plan does not offer a timeline for implementation, it makes recommendations for “all actors from Africa and Europe who are positioned to help in its uptake”, including research funders, ministries and regulatory agencies.

Aiming for equity

This week, the plan’s architects held a webinar to present the plan and to advocate for the benefits of deepening Africa-Europe collaboration in personalised medicine.

Speakers at the 20 January webinar highlighted the importance of equity, sustainability and inclusivity as core principles for the collaboration.

“Africa’s people really must be able to write their own genomics agenda,” said Mohamed Zahir Alimohamed, a lecturer at Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences in Tanzania.

He called for strategic funding and improved infrastructure to help the plan succeed. “We need to engage our community, researchers and funders to ensure this collaboration is transformative for both continents.”

Monika Frenzel, international coordinator in the biology and health department of France’s National Research Agency and a leading writer of the plan, said implementation now depends on stakeholders taking up the plan’s recommendations.

“We need to collaborate between different regions, considering Africa and Europe, to have comprehensive datasets that allow broadly applicable solutions,” she said.

Alimohamed urged African researchers and healthcare professionals to help shape the collaboration. “We are laying down the foundation of how the collaboration is going to look,” he said. “It’s up to us now to really make use of it.”