Beit Scholar Linia Zambezi, currently pursuing an MSc in Genomic Medicine at the University of Cambridge, recently provided the Trust with an exciting update.

In March this year, Linia joined an entrepreneurship programme called She Starts at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge. As part of the programme, she pitched an idea to develop a pharmacogenomics company in Zimbabwe. Her pitch was among the few selected to move forward in the programme. A few participants joined her to further develop the concept, and with guidance from mentors at AstraZeneca and Will Spooner,
the team was encouraged to think even bigger.

From this, Afromics was born, a company whose mission over the next 10 years is to build a biobank comprising five million African genomes. This ambitious initiative aims to address the significant underrepresentation of African genomes in global genomic databases, where currently less than 2% of genomic data is from African populations. (See: “Bridging the genomic data gap in Africa: implications for global
disease burdens”)

The team’s final pitch was well received by the judges and earned a special mention in Business Weekly (see: “Murray Edwards acts as just 4 per cent of Cambridge spin-outs are all-female led“).

Since that weekend, Linia and her co-founder, Dr. Tim Hearn, an Associate Professor at the University of Cambridge, have been hard at work developing Afromics. Together, they have secured partnerships with the Stratified Medicine Sequencing Lab (SMCL NGS Hub) and Cynapse to support the sequencing and secure storage of genomic data. Linia is also mentored by Yaw Bediako, CEO of Yemachi Biotech in Ghana, and has
partnered with Yemachi to carry out the sequencing of African genomes. Currently, the team is focused on conducting market research and engaging with potential customers, including pharmaceutical companies, academic researchers, and contract research organizations (CROs).

More recently, they were accepted into She Soars, an entrepreneurship initiative at Murray Edwards College running from May to June 2025. Through the programme, they will receive advanced training in entrepreneurship, business model development, team building, governance, finance, and intellectual property.