Uburu.ai

Uburu.ai is an NDPR-compliant middleware proficient in handling diverse datasets sourced from multiple on-premise and cloud data sources in Nigeria.

Dr Joel Aniegbe.

Founder, Uburu Health.

In Nigeria and across Sub-Saharan Africa, there is a lack of existing data pipeline infrastructure that connects health data sources (EMR, Lab, Pharmacy, Claims databases) to data consumers in Government and Industry.

Further, the landscape of data sources is very fragmented and siloed, with much data trapped in on-premise or cloud servers. 

This lack of data pipeline infrastructure and fragmented nature of the ecosystem has crippled utilisation of data and data-driven decision making. Making it near impossible to effectively understand and track metrics within the healthcare sector e.g. the number of M/C/S tests been done in the country and the spread of results from these tests.

These challenges hamstrings implementation of real-time surveillance dashboards.

Our solution serves data analyst in government and industry. 

It provides the pipeline infrastructure needed for data flow and processing from multiple sources.

We have engaged the IT teams at the Federal ministry of Health, Nigeria and Ministry's agencies in charge of communicable disease and cancer surveillance; to understand their needs for analysis-ready datasets within Nigeria.

We have also engaged the teams at Novartis, GSK, Pfizer, Roche and AstraZeneca Nigeria, in understanding their dataset needs.

In both government and industry, data analysis expertise is abundant, however, access to clean and ready datasets from the health ecosystem is challenging and that is the pain point we solve.

A lot of primary data is collated by Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in the healthcare sector in Nigeria. Due to the large number of these NGOs, it is very difficult for the government to coordinate accessing their data for data-driven policy decisions.

We would offer our platform at-cost (server fee) to government for this specific use case in accessing primary grassroots data relating to antimicrobial resistance collated by NGOs across Nigeria.

In spite of the fact that the US and most Western European countries remain the important centres for conducting clinical trials, ~35% of delay in studies is due to patient recruitment, nearly one-fifth investigators do not enrol any patients and about one- third enrol only 5% of evaluable patients. In most programs, only one-third consistently enrol patients. These challenges have prompted sponsors to conduct clinical trials in emerging markets like Africa.

With the current globalisation of clinical trials driven by the need to access wider pools of study participants, reduce study timelines, and address the global burden of disease; there is a clear advantage for increased recruitment in Africa. However, Africa with ~15% of the world's population, gets ~2% of global clinical trials. 

Validated EMR, Claims data contain rich country-specific epidemiological data. These datasets forms the basis of a model to forecast recruitment potential and build patient cohort location based on eligibility criteria. 

Our pipeline would furnish industry with the required datasets to expand clinical trials on new antimicrobials therapy to Sub Saharan Africa, enabling African patients access these cutting edge therapies.

Scaling for us means accelerating the account creation of African data sources on our platform.

We intend to do this is West African countries over the next 2 years by providing data pipeline services to the health government authorities in these countries. 

This ensures our onboarding of large number of data sources who would use our platform to meet regulatory request for data sharing, and in turn, we support these data sources share their data in a privacy compliant manner with industry at a fee.

We expect to have acquired 500 data processors across the West African countries by 2026, whose aggregate data should be representative of 50-60 million unique patients in West Africa.

Our impact metrics are:

1. total number of clinical trial dataset processed monthly
2. total number of patient providers contacted by Industry analysts monthly
3. total number of data-driven unique patient recruitments monthly.

We have dashboards in our admin console to track these metric.  

Funding is our major barrier in achieving our goals. Assembling a stellar data and software engineering team to build a solid data pipeline infrastructure requires capital.

To address this funding gap, we are fully engaged in investor relations and government contracts that drives cash flow to sustain and grow the team.

Additionally, ecosystem awareness of the capabilities and utility of a/our data pipeline infrastructure is low in Nigeria. We are addressing this my attending and speaking at National and international conferences relating to clinical trials and health policy.

Our major challenge is access to funding to complete the development of the data pipeline infrastructure. We believe the Trinity challenge would be of help in accessing this funding and technical partners to bring this solution to live in Nigeria.

We would love to collaborate with the NHS DigiTrial team and the EDGE clinical software team at University of Southampton, UK.