Profile
Naledi Maseko and the case for local genomic data
A breast cancer researcher at the University of Cape Town on why tumour profiles from African patients change what clinicians can act on, and why she also works on registries.
In this story: 4 people · 2 institutions · 1 paper
People
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Naledi Maseko
University of Cape Town · 2 AJCR papers
- Sipho Radebe University of Cape Town · 1 AJCR paper
- Ama Ofori University of Ghana · 2 AJCR papers
- Selam Bekele Addis Ababa University · 2 AJCR papers
Institutions
- University of Ghana Ghana · 2 AJCR papers
- University of Cape Town South Africa · 2 AJCR papers
Papers
Naledi Maseko appears twice in AJCR's first issue, which says something about how she works. One paper is a molecular study of triple-negative breast cancer in Cape Town; the other is a cancer-registry study in Addis Ababa. Both, she says, are about the same problem: decisions made with data that does not describe the patients in front of you.
Profiles that reflect the population
Triple-negative breast cancer is not one disease, and most of the molecular work that divides it into subgroups has been done in patients of European ancestry. Her Cape Town study, written with her Cape Town colleague Sipho Radebe and with Ama Ofori of the University of Ghana, models a workflow for profiling tumours across four referral sites. In 318 profiles, the share with an alteration a clinician could act on rose from 31% to 46% as the workflow matured.
"An actionable result only matters if someone at the tumour board can use it. That means the report has to arrive in time, and in a form people trust."
Naledi Maseko (synthetic interview)
From the bench to the registry
Her second paper, with Selam Bekele in Addis Ababa, looks at whether registries can capture every case. The link between the two is practical. Molecular findings mean little at population level without a registry that counts every case, and a registry gains value when it can hold more than a diagnosis code.
The Observatory shows the same pattern: the University of Cape Town connects to Ghana through one paper and to Ethiopia through the other.
Sample profile for website testing. Naledi Maseko, her colleagues and the studies are fictional; the institutions named are real but were not involved.
