MOJISOLA ADEYEYE

Mobilising Drugs and Vacciness DIRECTOR GENERAL, NAFDAC

Professor Adeyeye is the Director General (DG) of Nigeria’s National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) where she is leading regulatory and administrative reforms through quality management approach. She has

added strong governance structure and regulatory strengthening to NAFDAC through disciplined and motivating workforce, updating of regulations and guidelines, strengthening the local pharmaceutical companies through international best practices and encouraging local production. She has brought NAFDAC from insolvency to solvency and refocused the Agency to be Standard Operating Proceduredriven organization that has embraced international standards and best practices. She changed the culture of NAFDAC to Customer-focused and Agency-minded establishment in order to safeguard the health of the nation. She inaugurated Nigerian Herbal Medicine Product Committee (HMPC) as a means of fostering research involving herbal practitioners and academic researchers while the intellectual property is protected. The ultimate goal is to turn complementary alternative medicines into a research-driven, regulation controlled commercially viable commodities.

She is a Fellow of Nigeria Academy of Science, Nigeria Academy of Pharmacy, an Academic Research Fellow of American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy (AACP). She is the First African Woman Fellow, American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS) a society where only 3% of academia receives such recognition internationally.

She currently serves as the Chair of the Steering Committee of the African Medicines Regulatory Harmonization (AMRH) and the WHO-based Global Pediatric Regulatory Network. She represents NAFDAC on the International Coalition of Medicines Regulatory Authorities (ICMRA) and has been invited to be on the WHO Regional Expert Advisory Committee on Traditional Medicine for COVID-19.

Adeyeye says several researchers and practitioners have responded to NAFDAC’s call for expression of interest for Covid 19 related medicines and are being guided to submit such medicines to NAFDAC for expedited review. The Agency continues to encourage all stakeholders to present the products of their research findings and allow these remedies go through internationally recognized process of approval through pre-clinical and where applicable, clinical trials.

She noted the establishment of the Nigerian Herbal Medicine Product Committee (HMPC) that brings together Manufacturers, Academia, Researchers and relevant stakeholders by bridging the gap often created between traditional medicine practitioners (possible patent holders) and drug manufacturers, whose responsibility it would be to formulate the products. This collaboration, brokered by the Agency, aims at translating research of herbs into products of commerce with proven safety and efficacy. According to her, this minimum requirement of ‘proof of safety’ is the Agency’s way of encouraging production of herbal remedies from the country’s rich diversity of plants.

According to the DG of NAFDAC, the rush to mitigate the mortality and morbidly resulting from the COVID 19 pandemic has resulted in acceleration of product development, repurposing of formulations, off label use of therapeutics and the search for a vaccine to prevent COVID 19 and because no vaccine yet exists to prevent further spread of the virus, the huge burden of developing a cure or at best, a treatment for this deadly virus rests squarely on the shoulders of the medical world, of which Nigeria is no exception.