At the African Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Data-Intensive Sciences (ACE-Uganda), our core mission is to empower the continent’s brightest minds and conduct innovative research to solve our most pressing health challenges. That’s why we are delighted to announce our new partnership with Google DeepMind, a collaboration that will provide a budding cohort of young scientists from Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, and Tanzania with access to world-class AI tools and mentorship, supercharging their vital work.

A critical component of this partnership is dedicated to building AI research capacity to combat the urgent threat of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). This is a priority area for ACE-Uganda, and through this collaboration, we will host a dedicated regional AI for AMR symposium. This initiative, combined with targeted training, will equip our scientists with the advanced skills needed to drive AI-enabled innovation in AMR research, a field of immense importance for the health of our communities.

In addition, our community of students and early-career scientists will benefit from hands-on training and mentorship to advance their use of AI tools in scientific research. The programme will include:

• Hands-on workshops focused on integrating Google DeepMind tools including AlphaFold and AlphaMissense into research;
• An intensive four-day scientific competition, challenging our researchers to apply these AI tools to solve complex biological problems;
• A dedicated mentorship program for our students and researchers, pairing them with AlphaFold experts to guide their projects in proteomics and structural biology;
• A collaborative visualisation platform that leverages ACE-Uganda’s existing VR capacity to create interactive renditions of individual and interacting protein structures.

Our partnership will also provide researchers with access to crucial compute, enabling data-intensive computational research right here at ACE-Uganda.

With this kind of training and support, our researchers will be better positioned to accelerate discovery in areas that are of profound importance to our region. Beyond AMR, this includes important diseases like malaria, HIV, and TB, as well as genetic conditions such as sickle cell disease and the growing challenge of non-communicable diseases like cancers and diabetes.

Through this partnership, we are not just providing access to technology; we are nurturing the talent that will produce the next great biological breakthroughs, creating solutions for Africa, by Africans.