Four months in: Is SA’s new lottery operator delivering?

Eventually, make certain cell therapies available to more patients without the usual difficulties of matching donors and recipients. The company, as I understand it, has secured something in the region of 30 million rand in initial funding, raising bigger questions about investment, innovation, and whether South Africa can build a globally competitive biotechnology industry. I want to talk now to Professor Michael Pepper, co-founder, chief scientific officer at Altera Bioscientists or Biosciences.

Michael, a very warm welcome to you. So as I said in my introduction, we have produced in the past excellent medical scientists. Why do we struggle to turn that expertise into successful biotech businesses? So I think there are a number of factors. One is the appetite for investment into biotech. As you may well know, there's been a great deal of investment into fintech and cleantech, but biotech has not been as attractive.

The reasons for that is that time is required. You know, this gives rise to the so-called notion of patient investment, where one needs to be able to invest and wait for time for things to mature. And investors are not always comfortable with the notion of having to be patient for things to mature. So that's the one issue. The other is that our local environment, the ecosystem in which we work, has not been configured.

to cope with these high-risk, high-return initiatives. It's not that we don't have the capacity. We have extremely competent and competitive people. We're extremely resourceful as South Africans. But the ecosystem has not been configured from a structural point of view, from a regulatory point of view, in fact, from many different angles to cope with this.

And you don't have a type of Silicon Valley structure where you have a critical mass of companies all working towards different goals, but with the same ethos. And I think that's a very, very important factor here. Do we produce enough commercially viable research in order to start the process of building those businesses? Definitely, definitely, Jeremy. So we have two factors here, I think, which make our environment unique. The first,

Is that we have the highest genetic diversity in the world, which means that if you look at things from a genetic perspective, you'll probably find 90-95% of the answers here in South Africa. That would then impact on the rest of the world. The second and not so great reason for patients, but for us as researchers, is that we have a high burden of disease, which means that we have access to a lot of material and sometimes unique material that other people don't have access to in other parts of the world.