“Strong people don’t put others down — they lift them up.”
This is what the discrete panel says on the front of one of Africa’s most notable facilities.
Administered through a Cameroon-trained molecular biologist at Harvard, the African Center for Excellence for Infectious Disease Genomics (ACEGID) has been at the forefront of fighting fatal diseases such as Ebola, Lassa Fever and now COVID-19.
The strength of the laboratory is Professor Christian Happi, who is convinced by the company to push young African scientists to the most sensible clinical research.
“As long as Africa fails to make intellectual contributions, it will always be told what to do,” he said.
The director of ACEGID, 52, has already placed a marker in the war against coronavirus (COVID-19) by designing a cheap disease for highly contagious disease.
“I need to expand undeniable and affordable solutions, aligned with Africa and our environment,” he said, speaking in his office, his walls decorated with diplomas, awards and photographs of his family.
Happi founded his laboratory in 2016 in an old construction at Redeemer University in Ede, a modest city in southwestern Nigeria, with World Bank investment and Nigerian and foreign philanthropists.
Since then, only about 1,000 scientists, most commonly Nigerian and others from West Africa, have come to gain a high level of delight in biochemistry and genomics.
A shiny new construction, “Africa’s largest genomic center,” is expected to open until the end of the year in the tropical forests around Ede.
“It makes sense to be here in Nigeria. This country is africa; if it fails, the entire continent will fail with it,” Happi said.
Nigeria is home to not only two hundred million more people: its vast territory, which stretches from the edge of the Sahara to the tropical gulf coast of the Gulf of Guinea, it also hosts epidemics ranging from malaria and typhoid to meningitis, cholera and yellow fever.
This year, all ACEGID minds are focusing on COVID-19.
Nigeria has officially recorded some 800 deaths and more than 30,000 cases, however, the actual extent of the infection is much larger, given the mass and dense population in Lagos, Ibadan, Abuja and Kano, where social estrangement is almost impossible.
The country performs an average of 3,000 tests a day, a drop in the ocean for what is needed.
The Happi team at Ede has developed an accelerated control that has already been graded through the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and is lately being validated for use in Nigeria and Africa.
The check, which resembles the type of undeniable meter used for pregnancies, costs around $3 (2.60 euros) each, at around $100 for polymer chain reaction controls (PCR), an approach that requires a beloved and well-equipped lab.
“I’m interested in the big PCR machines used in Europe or the United States, which no public hospital can afford,” Happi said, moving from one lab to another.
“I prove that a grandmother of a village can do it in her rural clinic.”
The search for happi simplicity is carried out through the team.
It is the first laboratory to classify the genetic profile of the new coronavirus in Africa, a feat that took only a few days after the first case of the disease gave the impression in Lagos in early March.
The “incredible” speed, said Chikwe Ihekweazu, head of the Nigerian Centers for Disease Control (NCDC).
“Before, we had it in Europe or the United States.”
There are many to have studies of excellence at your fingertips.
“The virus can evolve in many ways. With genomic sequencing, you have the opportunity to examine this in real time,” Ihekweazu said.
“People might have no idea these paintings were in Africa,” Happi said last month in the prestigious clinical journal Nature.
“But we show that scientists on the continent can generate knowledge in the global combat opposed to COVID-19, while contributing to the genomics box.”
Happi and Ihekweazu, who are the same age, know each other well and have an unusual enemy.
“Professor Happi is a delicate character: we have a lot of debates, but we know we’re in Africa and the country,” Ihekweazu said.
In Cameroon, where he caught malaria as a child, Happi in biochemistry before travelling to Britain in 1998 at the age of 30 to attend a conference on malaria.
At the time, Africa was almost literally the country cousin in terms of its status in world research, and Happi recalled arriving at London’s Heathrow Airport — “a little African with a big suitcase, and feeling a little lost”.
But he made a big impact in the conference at Oxford, where as one of the few African attendees he put forward “a bunch of wacky ideas” for using gene technology in vaccines.
Such methods are at the heart of several COVID vaccines being researched today, but at the time such thinking was out of the mainstream, and Happi was snapped up by Harvard to carry out research there.
He studied and then taught there for a dozen years, specialising in malaria, a disease that claims nearly 400,000 lives each year, almost 100,000 of them in Nigeria alone.
“Until studies are done on the continent, there will be no vaccine,” Happi said. “You’ll have to be here.”
It was not his interest in malaria that brought him home, however, Lassa fever, a fatal hemorrhagic cousin of Ebola.
In 2007, learning about the disease that killed around 700 Nigerians each year, Happi was stupefied to find that tests for Lassa were sent to Germany. In the time it took to get the results back, 90 per cent of patients had already died.
“It is completely unacceptable that a disease discovered in 1969 is still undiagnosed in 2007,” he said at the time.
He spent the next year raising funds and headed to Irrua, in southern Nigeria, where he built a lab.
There he trained two young people who were fresh out of high school in the basics of microbiology, and conducted Africa’s first-ever home-grown tests for Lassa fever.
“There was nothing, no manpower or equipment,” he recalled.
“There wasn’t even electricity. We had to use a car battery to power the PCR machine!”
Today, Lassa tests are carried out much faster and with less trepidation. The disease, which is endemic to Nigeria, claims between 100 and 200 lives each year.
Based on this experience, Happi founded ACEGID, which has a learning crucible on African microbes: he recently discovered the Ekpoma 1 and Ekpoma 2 viruses, among a lot of viral strains that inhabit the rainforests of West Africa.
Despite these successes, the obstacles to setting down a solid foundation for African research are many.
Many scientists, doctors and fitness staff are drawn to the offer of higher wages and better operating conditions.
“Young African academics can be well informed at the world’s most productive universities, but if there is no design to welcome them to Africa once they graduate, it’s not good,” Happi said.
Idowu Olawoye, 27, studied molecular biology and computer science in England before returning home in 2016.
He insisted that it was not a challenge for him to paint in Ede, a small town more than a six-hour drive from Lagos, Nigeria’s bustling economic center.
“I really need to make an effect in my country,” he said.
Its function is to sift through genetic adjustments in a coronavirus pattern that, to other patterns, show how the pathogen spreads.
“Look, here you can see in this chart … It’s like his passport,” he says.
Her colleague, Jessica Uwamibe, 29, a PhD student in molecular biology, has been following the finishing touches of COVID-19 control and is recently researching a vaccine on the genetic profile of the virus discovered in Nigerian patients.
“We have diseases here, and now we have the wisdom and the facilities,” Uwamibe said. “Where else would I go?”
[AFP]
Vanguard News Nigeria.
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