Skip to content 
Nicola Mulder explains how the new African Bioinformatics Institute will support African-led science
A new player has joined Africa’s growing bioinformatics scene. The African Bioinformatics Institute, officially launched in January, aims to boost the continent’s capacity to analyse and interpret complex biological data— everything from disease surveillance to biodiversity research.
Backed by seed funding from Wellcome and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the ABI’s goal is to build infrastructure, train early career scientists, and develop tools to track and tackle health threats. Initially hosted at the University of Cape Town’s Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine, the ABI will eventually operate as an independent non-profit organisation.
Research Professional News spoke to Nicola Mulder, interim lead of the ABI and professor at UCT, about the institute’s ambitions, the importance of building bioinformatics capacity on the continent and what lies ahead for the organisation.
So what, in a nutshell, is the ABI?
The ABI is a distributed institute. That is quite different from something like the European Bioinformatics Institute, which is a physical, bricks-and-mortar place that offers services, research and training from a single hub. Instead, the ABI will have group leaders that remain at their home institutions but contribute their expertise to the collective work of the institute.
The ABI will have a central coordination hub, but the actual research remains independent. It’s really about creating a forum where African researchers and students feel they belong.
You ran H3ABioNet, a pan-African bioinformatics network, for over a decade until it ran out of funding recently. Will the ABI continue its legacy?
It will, but it will do more. Our training programmes under H3ABioNet were mostly in human genetics and pathogen genomics. But we couldn’t cover other key areas, like agriculture or biodiversity, even though there was huge demand. There’s an avalanche of data coming out of the continent. Several countries have their own national genome projects, and separately we are working towards 25,000 genomes. That effort requires shared data infrastructure, common compute platforms and, ideally, cross-border collaboration.
An application has also been submitted to Wellcome for an African Population Cohort Consortium, which will need the same infrastructure. And, of course, agriculture and biodiversity research needs this type of support too.
Where will ABI’s funding come from?
Wellcome is contributing around £5 million over five years, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is contributing around US$1.5 million over two years. This is seed funding—just catalytic support. That money has to stretch across 54 countries, so it doesn’t go very far. We decided not to fund individual research projects. That can be funded separately. What’s hard to fund is infrastructure, training and coordination—the glue that holds everything together. So we’re focusing the budget there, and also supporting major data initiatives.
Our model is to offer co-funding, expecting the partner research project to match our support. That way, we build a community where people help each other, and we avoid each group trying to build their own isolated service. Eventually, people need to include ABI participation in their own grants. We also want to leverage support from our African governments.
So this won’t be another project funded from outside Africa?
No. This is about long-term African ownership. You can’t rely forever on outside funding. Things can change overnight—just look at the NIH.
Oh, yes—will the US federal funding cuts affect the ABI?
Not directly, since ABI is independently funded. But I personally have NIH-funded projects, and it’s very uncertain right now. The financial year ended last Saturday, and I still don’t know if my grants will continue. Much of that work feeds directly into the services ABI would offer. If those projects get cut, we lose valuable capabilities. But the ABI gives us a chance to preserve that legacy.
Why is African ownership important?
In the past, especially during the Covid pandemic, some African groups were reluctant to share data due to concerns about recognition and ownership. African researchers may be hesitant to submit data to foreign databases, but they’re more comfortable with an African-owned platform. The data still becomes public, but ownership and stewardship matter.
What’s happening with the ABI right now?
We have an interim council in place, working on governance: how to select group leaders, what criteria to use for membership, and so on. We’re also developing communities of practice—networks focused on themes like biodiversity, agriculture or health. These will bring together both tool developers and tool users. We’re also looking to our long-term sustainability.
One of the most important things we’re trying to convey is that bioinformatics infrastructure is as essential as a lab in the data era. But it’s often invisible or taken for granted. Researchers assume they can just tack it onto a project without budgeting for it. Governments assume it will happen for free. But African governments are benefiting from these investments—they need to step up.
We want to engage governments and show them that this supports their national policies on open science, on data-sharing, on innovation. ABI is how you make those policies real.
Do you have any final message?
Just that the ABI is about preserving and building on what we’ve achieved—not losing it.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Nicola Mulder is interim lead of the ABI and a professor at the University of Cape Town.
