Meet the Alliance Global team who will be exhibiting at the Eleventh H3Africa Consortium Meeting taking place in Uganda from 22-25 March 2018. The Consortium Meeting will take place at the Lake Victoria Serena Resort.
The Human Heredity and Health in Africa (H3Africa) Initiative aims to facilitate a contemporary research approach to the study of genomics and environmental determinants of common diseases with the goal of improving the health of African populations. To accomplish this, the H3Africa Initiative aims to contribute to the development of the necessary expertise among African scientists, and to establish networks of African investigators.
Currently, there is an ongoing global effort to apply genomic science and associated technologies to further the understanding of health and disease in different populations, and, in particular, to identify individuals and populations who are at risk, due to genetic and/or environmental factors, for developing a specific disease. Possible outcomes of such research include early and more accurate diagnosis, the development of new drugs and potentially, personalized medicine – the systematic use of information about each individual patient to select or optimize the patient’s preventative and therapeutic care.
However, most African countries are being left behind in this genomic revolution and if this is not urgently addressed, genomics will contribute to the widening of global and ethnic inequalities in health and economic well-being.
In response to this challenge, the African Society of Human Genetics, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Wellcome Trust (WT) convened a Frontiers Meeting in Yaoundé, Cameroon in March 2009 to discuss a research agenda to study genetic diversity in health and disease in African populations. The meeting brought together scientific experts from a number of different fields to identify the major scientific questions, as well as the ethical and practical issues of pursuing a large-scale genomics research program in Africa. The key aim of the meeting was to engage with African scientists and other stakeholders in order to outline research priorities and discuss the appropriate study design needed to inform and ultimately impact health in the African populations. Following this meeting the concept of H3Africa was developed and the initiative was announced in June 2010. H3Africa is supported by the NIH Director’s Common Fund as an initiative within its Global Health Program and by the Wellcome Trust as part of their continuing research portfolio in Africa.
