Hope rises for medical diagnosis in Nigeria as NIMR produces first, locally made monkeypox test kits
SINCE the outbreak of monkeypox started earlier this year, the testing capacity in Nigeria has remained limited, and this could be attributed to unavailability of diagnostic kits.
To increase the chances of making diagnosis of monkeypox easy, accessible and affordable in Polymerase Chain Reaction ( PCR) facilities in Nigeria, researchers at the Nigerian Institute for Medical Research ( NIMR) Yaba, Lagos have developed and unveiled a new monkeypox viral DNA detection kit.
DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid, is the hereditary material in humans and almost all other organisms. RNA, abbreviation of ribonucleic acid, complex compound of high molecular weight that functions in cellular protein synthesis and replaces DNA as a carrier of genetic codes in some viruses.
The Minister of State for Health, Joseph Ekumankama, during his working visit to the research institute over the weekend unveiled the kit and commissioned two facilities: a Clinical Trial Centre and Emerging Virus Disease Laboratory.
Ekumankama said: “The clinical trial coordinating centre is to be used to carry out assessment of not only drugs and vaccines from elsewhere but also our home grown products; Clinical trials are the primary ways that researchers find out if a new treatment, like a new drug or diet or medical device is safe and effective in people and often used to learn if a new treatment is more effective and/ or has less harmful side effects than the standard treatment while the Emerging Virus Disease Laboratory was built to prepare Nigeria for future disease outbreak stemming out of our experiences during the COVID- 19 pandemic waves that is for diseases of the future that may occur newly or reemerge but are expanding in incidence and geographic areas, they may also be diseases that are currently unknown.”
A molecular biologist at NIMR, Dr. Joseph Shaibu shared his views as a member of the team that developed the monkeypox kit. He said the kit was developed with all the optimisation and validation processes done locally. He also added that the idea behind all these was to minimize the duration of time it takes to get the kits needed especially when there are outbreaks and to also make it more affordable.
“I was sent the cost for 96 monkeypox test at N980,000 last week; hardly will you see many people that can afford that in Nigeria. So, what we are trying to do is to produce kits that bridges the gap and these kits are highly effective with 95 percent sensitivity with 100 percent specificity and after analyzing everything, it could be up to 60 to 70 percent cheaper than what we have in circulation.
“We have intentions of making kits for most of these viruses so that Nigerian scientists can have our kits to do their work and also easy access to other diagnoses aside from malaria and typhoid for people in rural areas” he said.
Shaibu also explained why many PCR labs in the country do not test for monkeypox presently. He said: “Currently there are many PCR labs in the country but it is only NCDC that has been testing for monkeypox because of unavailability of the test kits and approval from NCDC but by the time these kits are available, I know that most of these labs will come up and begin to do it too.”
The Director General and CEO, NIMR, Prof. Babatunde Lawal Salako, said the advent of COVID- 19 has allowed the introduction of open real- time PCR equipment in many centres around the country and now the issue of monkeypox has allowed for the opportunity to deploy their proposed solutions to solving the challenges of access of case detection of monkeypox in other to support the reduction in test costs by providing very affordable and profitable kit to testing centres.
Salako appealed to the minister for help as the institute is facing a critical challenge in the area of staff replacement or recruitment where almost on a monthly basis one person resigns, especially among researchers, yet they do not have opportunity to replace them.