For Ayodeji Alaran, the future of innovation in Africa is making science and research raw material for startups. “We need to start evolving beyond technology to a knowledge and intellectual-driven enterprise,” he says.
In other words, fintechs and logistics startups may solve immediate problems, but Alaran believes that the real market-leading innovation that Africa needs will only come when academic research and deep science translate into products.
This conviction began growing from his early career, where, from the very first day, he was thrown into responsibilities far above his age and title. After completing his degree in Pharmacy from the University of Lagos, he joined GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) as an intern. Alaran found himself stepping into big shoes. “I was responsible for West and Central Africa, Angola, Nigeria, Ghana, and Gambia as an intern just from university,” he says. Alaran recalls “writing some of GSK’s policies for Ghana and Nigeria whilst an intern.” By the end of that single internship, he had gained experiences that planted the seed of entrepreneurship.
But Alaran wanted more. Drawn by the challenge of sales, he moved to Pfizer. For two years in eastern Nigeria, he learned the discipline of selling medicine to specialists using data and clinical evidence. These conversations, mixing science with persuasion, would become a defining skill in his later career.
From there, his career stretched across continents. He returned to GSK as a marketing manager for Africa and Asia. Then came Business School in London, and soon after, he was headhunted by IQVIA, a leading global healthcare data company, as the business director for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. This is where Alaran began to notice the gap, that in global health data conversations, Africa was almost always missing.
“It was a daily torture because as a leader within the Europe, Middle East, and Africa team, there was never a time when Africa was a conversation,” he says. “ A lot of the projects were in Europe. When we’re talking about innovation, about patient recruitment for trials, or we’re talking about studies, we never came up.”
He recalled when a clinical trial that was to happen in Nigeria was cancelled because of the inability to recruit patients. “We couldn’t find them. We didn’t have what it took to find them. If you’re talking about inclusion, who do you hold accountable? It can’t be these guys because they’re not the ones that will come and build your infrastructure or gather the data that they need.”
This experience left him restless; despite earning six figures in the UK, he felt he was undersizing his capacity. He resigned in 2022 and returned to Lagos. Some of his colleagues felt he was letting down the Black community, as he was often the only black person in a room of 50 or 60 executives shaping healthcare data strategies. But Alaran was more focused on solving the problem than remaining a figure of representation in the room.
Enters PBR Life Sciences
Back in Lagos, Alaran began the grind of turning his idea into reality by founding PBR Life Sciences, a healthcare data analytics company that provides companies with data and insights to make informed decisions within the countries they operate. “In 2016, I would go to the library somewhere in Ilupeju to sit and clean data row by row in Excel. I had to do about a million rows alone. For about 3 months, that was all I was doing.”
After raising an angel round in 2021, Alaran hired his first team to begin gathering health data, starting with medications in circulation across Nigeria. They had to manually clean pharmaceutical data after quickly realising how messy and local that data could be. The datasets included everything from drugs, quantity sold, and prices across hundreds of pharmacies in Nigeria alone. There was no consistency in the way the drugs were named. For example, while one doctor might record ‘PCM’, another would write ‘paracetamol.’ Alaran explained that the scattered nature of the data made it almost impossible to use for research.
At the time, there was no artificial intelligence model capable of cleaning the data. The work had to be done manually.
The team tried experimenting with Excel functions to make the process faster, but what they really needed was an engine that could learn and adapt to the data. Eventually, they built their own AI algorithm by training the system to recognise and standardise drug entries across the board. Now they can clean up data in 30 minutes instead of 10 months. The AI model’s database covers over 10,000 pharmaceutical brands, over 70 million drug sales, and 23,000 diseases.
With this foundation, PBR moved to building products. The company has platforms that show drug consumption patterns in pharmacies across countries. It provides information about the most diagnosed diseases, what is used to treat them, the cost of care, and disease prevalence by state. Its latest product, the Health Data Lab, allows researchers and pharmaceutical companies to query African health data reliably.
The need for PBR’s work was evident in its recent white paper on improving sickle cell disease care in Nigeria, which revealed that only a fraction of sickle cell patients were on the only effective drug, Hydroxyurea. In another case, Alaran recalls when a pharma company in Lagos lost $700,000 on expired drugs because they didn’t have reliable consumption data.
Alaran wants to eliminate these blind spots with PBR’s products. Today, its datasets are used by companies like Sanofi, Pfizer, Roche, Fidson, Emzor, and organisations like the World Bank. Since its launch in 2015, PBR has raised $1 million from investors, including Launch Africa, Octerra Capital, and Microtraction.
Alaran believes that the solution to Africa’s health data problem is making data available and building the right infrastructure and technology. “Less than 1% of medicines used in Africa have never been tested on African patients, and little data is collected on how Africans respond to them,” he adds. “ This means future medicines may not work well for Africans.”
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article incorrectly spelled the name of one of the investors. It has now been updated.
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