Hello, I'm Dr. Eric Green, Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the United States National Institutes of Health, or NIH. Our institute is responsible for leading NIH's contribution to the Human Heredity and Health in Africa project, or H3Africa. I was delighted to come to AFRICON two previous occasions to participate in key meetings associated with what has now become the H3Africa project, but my schedule this month precluded my travel there to attend this meeting, and for that, I'm very sorry. However, I am certain that Dr. Jane Peterson, NHGRI's Project Director for H3Africa, and Dr. Mark Geyer, the NHGRI Deputy Director and also Director of our Extramural Research Program, will effectively represent this important project and will be extremely helpful to you. As you probably know, H3Africa is a partnership among the African Society of Human Genetics, the NIH, and the Wellcome Trust, a global charity based in the United Kingdom. More than half of the NIH contribution comes from something called the NIH Common Fund, a program that supports multidisciplinary programs. NIH Common Fund projects aim to break down key roadblocks in biomedical research that impede basic scientific discoveries and their translation to clinical advances. NIH Common Fund projects also act as catalysts by advancing work in emerging fields such as genomics. At this time, the NIH Common Fund Global Health Initiative supports biomedical research and training through two programs, H3Africa and the Medical Education Partnership Initiative, also called MEPI. In addition to NIH Common Fund support, H3Africa is further supported by several institutes and centers at NIH, including the NHGRI, the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, the NIH Office of AIDS Research, and the NIH Fogarty International Center. Our goal for H3Africa is both simple and profound. We hope to help African researchers develop a sustainable, collaborative research enterprise that will improve health in Africa. Through H3Africa, we plan to support world-class research and infrastructure building projects with an emphasis on using contemporary research approaches to study the genomic and environmental determinants of common diseases. The heritage of all people has been traced to Africa. Much can be learned about all human populations in the world by studying African populations. Furthermore, many previous studies, including the International HapMap Project, have shown that Africans have the greatest amount of genetic variation. Studying the population with the greatest genetic variability should provide insights about the role of genetics in health and disease for all people, including Africans themselves. While the competition for NIH funding is fierce, global health is too important to ignore. NIH remains profoundly interested in funding good science in Africa, where there is tremendous intellectual capacity, exciting scientific opportunities, and a need to improve health care. To help researchers compete for limited funding for high priority projects, NIH often conducts technical information sessions, like the one you are now attending. I urge you to take full advantage of this meeting and to ask every question you may have about the research and infrastructure building that NIH seeks to support, including questions about the grant process, proposal writing, and grants administration. When you sit down to write your grant application, which takes an enormous amount of time and effort, I want you to have all the information that you need. You are, of course, welcome to continue asking questions after the meeting by email and phone. And please be sure to visit the H3Africa website, h3africa.org, for updates and contact information. NIH is committed to supporting genetics and genomics research, as well as training and infrastructure building in Africa. Through this work, the African scientific community will become empowered to make important breakthroughs about many diseases, from understanding their causes to improve diagnostics and treatments. We look forward to building enduring partnerships with you, our African scientific colleagues. Thank you, and good luck, and I hope that you have a productive meeting.


Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Alex Clement from Asencourt Energy. How are you today? I'm good, Tracy. Thanks for having me. Your volume has been incredibly high recently. Can you tell me what you attribute that to Alex? Well, we've had a fairly liquid market for Asencourt for some time, but I think a lot of it has to do today, in particular with Cameco. I had a very good earnings call, I believe, this morning, and I think that charged the market a little bit. It's been building over the last week. We've seen some volumes pick up on the Australian exchange for uranium holdings there, so it's starting to creep in here. The last few days have been up days, which is nice because we've been really in a middling fare for the last, really since November or December, up, down, up, down, red, green, red, green. So maybe a few green days is what we need in the sector to get everybody fired up again. And of course, Alex, I think anyone who's followed Asencourt Energy understands that you've been an exception to the rule. You are a critical material player, and uranium and lithium, would that be a correct way to introduce you to those that may not be following you yet? Yeah, we're primarily uranium, and we have a lithium project, a respective lithium project in Peru, which is sort of on the back burner because everything's heated up here in Canada in terms of the uranium cycle and the Athabascus. So we're in the middle of a drill program at our East Preston project. We just started that a week or so ago and will be lots of news flow from there, and it's exciting time for us. So for those of you out there, Athabasca Basin, we're talking uranium, and you just recently announced some drill results. Would you like to talk to us about the highlights? Well, yeah, the commencement of our drill program. No results at this point, where we're really just in beginning stages. We're probably three or four holes in, five holes in. We're going to be doing upwards of 30, 35 holes, six to 7,000 meters. And it's a big program. It's our biggest program to date, but we're well funded. And the project is massive. It's 25,000 hectares. We've got about 30 kilometers worth of trends or target areas to drill. And this is really the first big pass that we've done in a portion of that ground. We've had, the spectrum has really swung on enthusiasm for uranium. It's kind of shown a life of its own. I know you're an expert in this sector. Would you like to comment on where you think this is going to go in 2022? Well, there's a lot of things push and pull, right? We have a dynamic here, supply-demand dynamic that's been fomenting for years. And that really, the amount of reactors online, coming online in the build stage, the planning stage, are pretty much at record levels. COVID, low spot prices, there's been a lot of reasons why production has been curtailed. So you've got that sort of push and pull going on.  We had a decade of low spot prices late last year and over 2021, the spot price crept up towards $50 a pound. It's in the mid to low 40s right now. And this is what the sector needs. But most importantly, I think the demand from the U.S. utilities is at and will be at an all-time high. I mean, they need to ink long-term contracts. And when they start to ink these contracts with the producers, the spot price is going to shoot through the roof because I can tell you that the producers didn't wait a 10-year through a 10-year bear market to sell cheaply at the first sign of a rejuvenated market. And so you'll see the spot price move as the demand increases via these long-term contracts. And I'm going to go ahead, and if you could just quickly introduce Azencourt Energy to some investors out there that may now be looking at Uranium for all the right reasons, why Azencourt? Well, we're extremely well-capitalized. We have north of $12 million in the bank for a pre-discovery drill company, a drill stage company. That's a massive statement to make. The reason we have such institutional support, I should mention, there's at least 20 funds, institutional funds that have invested in the company. And why they did that is mainly a validation of the project that we're drilling at East Preston. We subsequently have picked up the second project, Hatchet Lake, also in the Athabasca. And honestly, I think you have to be looking at discovery in a bull market as one of the pillars of a good portfolio. So how do you find that? You look for a drill stage company that's well-capitalized, that has a sizable project in the right area. And we have billions in market caps surrounding us where we are in the western Athabasca with our East Preston project. So those are the things you look for. And I urge people who are looking at this maybe for the first time to do their research. Take a look at AzencourtEnergy.com. We've got a lot of information there. But certainly things going for us, well-capitalized. We have a sizable project and we're drilling actively as we speak. Well, you heard it from Alex. I was going to recap the highlights, but you just did an excellent job. For those of you out there, if you're looking for more additional information, and I also urge you to go to the AzencourtEnergy website because it's an excellent one. Send it to us and we'll get you over to Alex and team. Thank you for joining us today, Mr. Klenman. Thank you, Tracy. Have a great day.