Scientists who have worked at the centre.
is almost impossible.
Test simple, fast
The country carries out on average only 3 000 tests a day – a drop in the ocean for what is needed. Happi’s team in Ede has developed a fast-track test that has already been certified by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and is currently being vetted for use in Nigeria and across Africa.
The test – which resembles the kind of simple dip stick used for pregnancies – costs around $3 (about R49) each, against about $100 for polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests, a method that requires an expensive, wellequipped lab.
“I’m not interested in the big PCR machines used in Europe or the US, which no public hospital here can afford,” said Happi, striding between laboratories.
“I want tests that a grandmother can get done in her rural clinic.”
Happi’s quest for simplicity is being conducted with state-ofthe-art equipment.
It was the first lab to sequence the genetic profile of the new coronavirus in Africa – a feat that took just a few days after the first case of the disease showed up in Lagos in early March.
The speed was “incredible”, said Chikwe Ihekweazu, head of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC).
“Previously, we would have done it in Europe or in the States.”
Ability to study in real time
There are many advantages to having research excellence on one’s doorstep.
“The virus can evolve rapidly and in many ways. With genomic sequencing you have the ability to study that in real time,” said Ihekweazu.
“People might have thought that this work was impossible in Africa,” Happi said last month in the science journal Nature.
“But we are demonstrating that the continent’s scientists can generate crucial data in the global fight against Covid-19 – as well as contributing to the field of genomics.”
Happi and Ihekweazu, who are of the same age, know each other well and have a common foe.
“Professor Happi is a tough character – we have a lot of debates, but both of us know that we are committed to Africa and to the country,” said Ihekweazu.
In Cameroon, where he caught malaria as a child, Happi trained in biochemistry before going 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”.
Made a big impact
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-19 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.
“As long as research is not carried out on the continent, there will be no vaccine,” said Happi. “You have to be here.”
Lassa fever
It wasn’t his interest in malaria that brought him home, but Lassa fever – a deadly haemorrhagic cousin of ebola.
In 2007, learning about the disease that killed about 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% of patients had already died.
“It is completely unacceptable that a disease discovered in 1969 still does not have diagnostics in 2007,” he said at the time.
He spent the next year raising funds and headed to Irrua, 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 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.
Bolstered by this experience, Happi founded ACEGID, which became a crucible of learning about African microbes – he recently discovered the Ekpoma 1 and Ekpoma 2 viruses among hundreds of viral strains that inhabit tropical forests in West Africa. –