The African Innovation Foundation (AIF) yesterday named two South African doctors among the top 10 nominees for its landmark programme, the Innovation Prize for Africa (IPA).
The South African nominees are Dr Imogen Wright, co-founder of Hyrax Biosciences, and Dr Kit Vaughan, chief executive of Cape Ray.
Wright, who is a software developer and computational biologist, has been nominated for Exatype - a software solution that enables healthcare workers to determine HIV-positive patients' responsiveness to anti-retroviral drug treatment.
Vaughan has been selected for the development of Aceso - an imaging technology capable of performing full-field digital mammography and automated breast ultrasound at the same time, dramatically improving breast cancer detection.
Now celebrating its fifth year under the theme "Made in Africa", IPA is an innovation initiative on the African continent, offering a prize of $150 000 and incentives to spur growth and prosperity in Africa through home-grown solutions.
Instant detection
Aceso is a R30 million machine that was funded by the Industrial Development Corporation, and allows for the instant detection of even the most microscopic cancer cells.
According to Cape Ray, Aceso is a world-first imaging system that combines mammographic and ultrasound technologies. This does away with the need for multiple screening tests, particularly when analysing dense breast tissue.
The company adds that with the machine, for the first time, digital mammography and ultrasound technology have been combined in a single screening unit to cut the time for the accurate early diagnosis of breast cancer.
Vaughan says the machine would be tested further before it is awarded the CE mark that would allow it to be marketed in Africa and Europe. It would also need to be approved by the Food and Drug Administration to be marketed in the US.
"With this machine, you can perform the mammographic and ultrasound functions at the same time," he says.
"Not only do you save time, but you don't have to have two machines, so you save money too. The key about this technology is it can be widely used to reach a large number of people, so it is ideal to use in a public healthcare setting," Vaughan notes.
Managing HIV/AIDS
Wright's Exatype processes the highly complex data produced by advanced "next-generation" DNA sequencing of the HIV DNA in a patient's blood.
"Through a simple report, it detects drugs that are resistant to the patient, then highlights the need to avoid these to ensure successful treatment," says Wright.
Exatype has the potential to contribute towards effectively managing HIV/AIDS in Africa, and also holds promise in helping detect drug resistance for other disease burdens such as tuberculosis and malaria, she adds.
"HIV drug resistance testing is a critical step in the selection of an appropriate anti-retroviral treatment regimen, improving patient health and preventing treatment failure. However, traditional drug resistance testing methods are too expensive for routine use in resource-constrained settings."
She explains the Exatype HIV drug resistance testing platform is a simple Web service, which analyses HIV DNA from one or many patients, sequenced in parallel by a high-throughput sequencing machine.
"This high-throughput method reduces the cost per-patient of drug resistance testing up to tenfold. Exatype takes raw sequence data and, using our clinical-grade processes, outputs an easy-to-interpret drug resistance report for each patient."
Wright previously worked as a software development engineer in the Amazon EC2 compute team, and as a senior software developer and team lead for London-based big data start-up, Skimlinks.
She subsequently completed a PhD in bioinformatics, during which she designed and implemented Hyrax Biosciences' accurate mutation-calling algorithm.
Africa's potential
"In the past five years, I've seen innovation grow from a mere buzzword to a sturdy path for African growth in multi-disciplinary industries across the continent," says Pauline Mujawamariya Koelbl, IPA director.
"As Africans, we have the talent, potential and clout to solve our own problems with ingenuity too, and IPA is testimony of this."
The IPA says it has seen tremendous growth in applications and increasing interest from both innovators and innovation enablers over the years. To date, IPA has attracted more than 6 000 innovators from 50 African countries.
AIF will host the IPA 2016: Made in Africa awards ceremony and its first Innovation Ecosystems Connector on 22 and 23 June in Gaborone, Botswana.
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