HealthScapades #10 | Health Innovation: For Where? | 22.08.2024
by Tayo Fasuan
My time at 54gene was brief, but it provided many watershed moments for me in terms of professional work experiences, the intricacies of working in the biomedical private sector, and, of course, the future of innovations in health in Nigeria.
I joined as a contract staff molecular scientist during the COVID-19 pandemic, spending six months at the Ekiti State molecular laboratory, where I carried out diagnostic tests for suspected patients. I quickly got tired and bored, though, and later got so sick that I had to resign.
However, it was mainly boredom and disillusionment that made me leave. The reason for my boredom was simply because of the routine diagnostics that I was carrying out. The truth was that I had joined 54gene with the hope that, in the near future, I could switch from working on COVID-19 to working as part of their African Genome Project.
Seeing pictures of tonnes of massive equipment purchased and being operated by my colleagues in the Lagos head office got me breathless with excitement. I dreamt of nothing more than being involved in doing some real, applied, innovative work in the long run.
According to the World Economic Forum, “54gene is an African genomics research, services, and development company addressing the need to include under-represented African genomic data in research, which could lead to medical breakthroughs and new healthcare solutions worldwide.”
“Through its research collaborations and commercial partnerships, it will enable the study of African genetics to learn the underlying genetic drivers of disease affecting everyone globally. Additionally, 54gene strives to understand the genetic impact on disease penetrance and risk in Africans, with a goal of developing better diagnostic and risk assessment tests to inform a more targeted approach to healthcare.”
From the above, one can see how excited I was to have joined such a huge project, but a few years down the line, it was a failed project whose demise was more celebrated than its start and efforts. While I won’t offer any opinions about the crash of 54gene, I will categorically say that the project was the first and probably the last to delve into real innovative development in healthcare in Nigeria.
The rest of what we have been doing for years is replication and repetition of what had been done years ago in other countries. Nigeria isn’t innovating anything, and that’s the sad reality. For upcoming biomedical scientists like myself and others, we are hoping, just like we had hoped for years, that we can really witness real developmental innovations in health and life science fields for the betterment of the country.
It’s one of the longest waits in the history of Nigeria. So, maybe we can get lucky soon.