There is a term for the grouping of countries outside what has been tacitly defined as the centre in geopolitical and commercial terms: Rest of World. The framing depends on what the centre is to the person working the spreadsheet. It’s used not necessarily to discriminate, but for expediency.
In the life sciences space, a Rest of World categorisation often refers to Africa, West Asia, Latin America and much of Asia. Most of these are geographies that modern pharmaceutical capability and self-sufficiency left behind, underinvested and underserved.
What is often ignored in these conversations, or relegated to a footnote, is how much these regions have contributed and continue to contribute to the modern world. Whether it is the manuscript libraries of Timbuktu, or Al-Azhar in Cairo teaching without a break since the 10th century, or the teachings of the Aksumite civilisation or Southern and Central Africa’s pre-colonial oral and craft-based knowledge systems, the wealth of accumulated knowledge that has passed down through generations here has shaped fields as diverse as engineering, trade, logistics, astronomy, architecture, grammar, and pharmaceuticals.
Drugs for cardiac care, for myasthenia gravis and Alzheimer’s symptom management, even drugs central to chemotherapy regimens owe their origins to Africa. One of the first modern antihypertensives, which is also one of the first antipsychotics, came from a root used in India for two thousand years. The methods for systematically extracting, purifying, and documenting a compound were brought together in West Asia, where the first pharmacies were opened in Baghdad circa 754.
How fitting then for this edition of symBIONT in partnership with Pharmaconex in Egypt, that we talk about geographies where the story of who builds capability, and how, is being written now.
Like Sammy, who has spent 18 years building the missing pieces of Nigeria’s healthcare puzzle,
like Haşim, whose life’s work in contamination control has been driven by curiosity and determinism,
like Jason, who has spent thirty years making cleanrooms safer and giving everything he knows away,
like Yara, whose path started with writing, and who found herself living out a dream she didn’t fully realise she was building,
like Aamer, who is asking family-held companies in India to part with something they have never had to price, so the industry they helped build can outlast them,
and like Pharmaconex itself, where the vision of a self-sustaining Africa continues the march forward into reality.
Each one of our Linchpins is writing a chapter of this story, in geographies or contexts the life sciences industry has overlooked for far too long.
We hope you enjoy getting to know them as much as we did.
– Vinod
