AGMP: The African Genomic Medicine Portal

AGMP: The African Genomic Medicine Portal

Last Updated on February 19, 2022 by Joseph Gut – thasso

February 20, 2022 – Genomics data are currently being produced at unprecedented rates, resulting in increased knowledge discovery and submission to public data repositories. Hopefully, these data assemblies will one day serve the advanced implementation of theragenomics and personalized medicine and individualised drug safety in hospital and private practice settings all over the world.

However, there exist to date some discrepancies on the amount of underlying data available to some populations. Particularly, genomic information on African-ancestry populations remains significantly low compared with European- and Asian-ancestry populations. This information is typically segmented across several different biomedical data repositories, which often lack sufficient fine-grained structure and annotation to account for the diversity of African populations, leading to many challenges related to the retrieval, representation and findability of such information. To overcome these challenges, a large group of Africa-based researchers has developed the African Genomic Medicine Portal (AGMP), a database that contains metadata on genomic medicine studies conducted on African-ancestry populations. The metadata is curated from two public databases related to genomic medicine, PharmGKB and DisGeNET. The metadata retrieved from these source databases were limited to genomic variants that were associated with disease aetiology or treatment in the context of African-ancestry populations. Over 2000 variants relevant to populations of African ancestry were retrieved. Subsequently, domain experts curated and annotated additional information associated with the studies that reported the variants, including geographical origin, ethnolinguistic group, level of association significance and other relevant study information, such as study design and sample size, where available.

The AGMP functions as a dedicated resource through which to access African-specific information on genomics as applied to health research, through querying variants, genes, diseases and drugs. The portal and its corresponding technical documentation, implementation code and content are publicly available.

See here the full article about the creation of the AGMP, and here a short video sequence on the impact of genomics on health and disease in African populations:

Ph.D.; Professor in Pharmacology and Toxicology. Senior expert in theragenomic and personalized medicine and individualized drug safety. Senior expert in pharmaco- and toxicogenetics. Senior expert in human safety of drugs, chemicals, environmental pollutants, and dietary ingredients.