Major new African gene study announced

An ambitious new health project announced this week will seek to capitalise on Africa’s unique genetic diversity to further understanding of how genes interact with the environment in relation to diseases such as cancer, heart disease and malaria.

The Human Heredity and Health in Africa Project (H3 Africa) is a partnership between the UK’s Wellcome Trust and the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and will study the genes, diet and other variables of thousands of people from Cameroon, Ghana, Mali, Sudan, Tanzania, Tunisia and other African countries. The project is being aided by the African Society for Human Genetics, which is building research capacity spanning training and infrastructure.

Of major interest to the researchers is how genes determine the way in which an individual responds to an infection, such as how severely they become ill as well as influencing the effectiveness of certain medications.

African populations are known to have far greater genetic diversity than in Wester European or Asian populations and it is hoped that H3 Africa may shine some light on rare genetic variations causing disease throughout the world, leading to new drugs and treatments. African populations also provide opportunities to examine the relationships between diseases and unique environmental factors such as high-salt diets.

Previously, samples collected in Africa for research projects were typically taken back to Western research labs for analysis. This new initiative will provide a proper framework both for improving African health as well as developing unique genetic-based solutions to global challenges.

"H3 Africa will build the capacity for African researchers to study African populations to solve African problems, and will create strong collaborations between African researchers and those in Europe, the United States, and other parts of the world,” said Dr Charles N Rotimi, President of the African Society and Director of the Center for Research on Genomics and Global Health at the National Human Genome Research Institute in the U.S.

Over the next five years, H3 Africa will receive a minimum of $US12 million from the Wellcome Trust along with $US5 million a year from the NIH in addition to administrative and scientific support. The NIH has already put up US$750,000 to start the project.

Two working groups, one focussed on communicable and the other on non-communicable diseases, have been set up to help oversee the initiative and will convene in the autumn for a series of meetings at Oxford University and Cape Town.