The AfricAsia Single Cell Genomics Initiative

The human single-cell genomics database is heavily skewed toward wealthy populations, leaving sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia—regions with the highest infectious disease burdens—almost entirely absent from the map. This initiative will establish a collaborative single-cell genomics platform across five Wellcome Africa and Asia Programmes, spanning Malawi, South Africa, Kenya, Vietnam, and Thailand. Single-cell technologies reveal how individual cells behave during infection, but without data from these regions, scientists cannot fully understand how pathogens interact with genetically diverse human populations or how local immune responses differ. The project includes four work packages focused on training local researchers and tackling diseases that matter most in these settings. If successful, this will diversify the global genomics database and give researchers in high-disease-burden regions the tools to study infections at the same resolution as their counterparts in Europe or North America. The insights could eventually inform vaccines or treatments tailored to populations that current research largely ignores. This is primarily a capacity-building and data-diversification effort—fundamental science that corrects a systemic blind spot in human biology.