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The Federal Government of Nigeria, on Thursday, launched a diagnostic kit, RNASwift, for the identification of coronavirus’ causal agent.
The new diagnostic kit was designed, developed and validated by Nigerian scientists.
It holds huge potentials for the country’s plan at scaling up testing for COVID-19, the acting Director-General of National Biotechnology Development Agency (NABDA), Prof Alex Akpa, whose agency produced the kit, said at the launch in Abuja on Thursday.
“The diagnostic kit is a product of cutting-edge biotechnology, which involves the exploitation of molecular biology to design, develop and validate a cost-effective but yet very top-of-the-range kit for COVID-19 testing”, Prof Akpa said.
“The immediate aim is to produce reagents for real-time Polymerase Chain Reaction, PCR, and remember, recently, the lack of reagents stalled work in Kano and molecular diagnosis could no longer take place,’’ Akpa added.
He also recalled that the scarcity of reagents stalled COVID-19 diagnosis in Lagos for many days.
“This project is, therefore, designed to enable not only Nigeria but the whole of Africa to put the issue of shortage of reagents behind,’’ he added.
He said the project was a Pan-African endeavour whose partners include Ethiopia, NCDC and the University of Sheffield, U.K., among others; with funding to come from African Development Bank.
Chief Molecular Bioengineer at the National Reference Laboratory of NCDC, Dr. Ndodo Nnaemeka, said the agency’s Director General, Dr. Chikwe Ihekweazu, had directed him to launch the project.
Nnaemeka said the project had been designed to solve the problem of RNA extraction kit shortage, which had become a global issue.
He said there was the need to have more extraction kits in-country, and that there were growing demands worldwide for the product.
“The western world prioritises their own interest first by making sure that they meet their local needs before exporting to other countries; so, there was really need for it,’’ he said,
Nnaemeka said the first phase of the evaluation results he carried out with NABDA’s team of scientists was “awesome and successful.’’
“The kits compete favourably well with other international kits we are using,” he said; adding, “in fact, it scored highly in purity and in quantity of extraction and we are thinking of scaling up production,’’ he added.