Until 2020 every whole human genome 'from' Nigeria — including the samples that underpinned the H3Africa Consortium's 426-genome African Genome Variation Project (Nature 2015) and the 24-genome Yoruba reference panel of the 1000 Genomes Project — had been physically shipped to sequencing centres in the United Kingdom, the United States, or South Africa for processing. The samples left, the data returned, and the value-added analytical work remained outside the country. The Centre for Genomics of Non-Communicable Diseases and Personalised Healthcare (CGNPH) at Covenant University, Ota, was established in 2019 by Professor Emeka Iweala with a mandate to close that loop.
In early 2020 the CGNPH commissioned an Illumina NextSeq 550 sequencing platform — installed and validated by Illumina engineers in collaboration with the Nigerian distributor Inqaba Biotec West Africa. The first complete human genome sequenced end-to-end on Nigerian soil was completed in the CGNPH facility in 2020, validated against the GRCh38 reference assembly and confirmed by Illumina's regional headquarters. The work was reported in Illumina's official AMEA regional communications and recognised by the Nigerian Federal Ministry of Health and the Nigerian Academy of Science as a foundational milestone for Nigerian genomic medicine.
The significance is structural rather than scientific in the narrow sense — the underlying short-read sequencing chemistry is identical worldwide — but it is significant nonetheless. It eliminated the regulatory, ethical and logistical friction of exporting biological samples; it placed the value-added bioinformatics work, and the resulting publications, in Nigerian hands; and it created the technical platform for the subsequent expansion of Nigerian genomic surveillance during the COVID-19 pandemic, in which the African Centre of Excellence for Genomics of Infectious Diseases (ACEGID) at Redeemer's University, Ede, became one of the WHO-designated reference laboratories for SARS-CoV-2 sequencing in West Africa.
CGNPH has since processed several hundred whole-genome and exome samples, primarily for sickle-cell disease, breast cancer and hypertension research, and is a partner laboratory of the H3Africa successor programme.