‘How IRCE will help drive medical research in Nigeria’

Dr Charles Olalekan Mensah, is the Chief Operating Officer and Managing Director of the Institute of Human Virology, Nigeria (IHVN). In this interview, he speaks on how the institute’s International Research Centre of Excellence (IRCE) will help improve medical research in the country, provision of health services for vulnerable groups and interventions for the COVID-19 […]

Dr Charles Olalekan Mensah, is the Chief Operating Officer and Managing Director of the Institute of Human Virology, Nigeria (IHVN). In this interview, he speaks on how the institute’s International Research Centre of Excellence (IRCE) will help improve medical research in the country, provision of health services for vulnerable groups and interventions for the COVID-19 pandemic among others.

As an organisation deeply involved in curbing the spread of infectious and non-infectious diseases, when do you plan to commercialize your activities?

Commercialization has always been at the back of our mind. However, we are also very careful because of the operating environment. Reports from the National Bureau of Statistics indicate that many Nigerians are living in poverty.

It is tough for people to access quality healthcare and anytime you talk about commercialization, it makes it more difficult. We are trying to get into a location where at least some of the costs that we currently incur, particularly costs associated with facilities, will be reduced.

As soon as we move into the new building for our International Research Centre of Excellence (IRCE), we will begin to look at commercialisation in the affordable sense. We don’t want to do commercialisation just to make money, the services should still be affordable to the general population because health care is a human right.

How will the International Research Centre of Excellence improve research in the country?

Nigerians do a lot of research but one of the challenges that we have observed based on our interactions with lots of universities and institutions in Nigeria over the past 16 years is the unavailability of laboratories, and where available, the inadequate maintenance of medical research equipment.

Laboratories are not kept to standard in the country; you see the physical laboratories and some functioning equipment but if you subject them to clinical standards from the World Health Organisation (WHO) and other organisations, most of them fail. We then resolved to use our International Research Centre of Excellence (IRCE) to facilitate not only the establishment but also the outstanding maintenance that we have to do on a lot of equipment in the country.

The centre is not just going to be a laboratory research centre, we are also going to train biomedical engineers to help sustain already established equipment in research laboratories all over the country.

We have been doing that since 2004 and intend to emphasize on it. We will use the centre to promote best practices in laboratory operations because laboratories are the bedrock of research. This will enable very bright minds in Nigeria, and Africa to have a very good resource to do their research. We are partnership with universities in Nigeria and international ones on this.

What are your specific plans for partnership with key research institutes in the country such as the National Institute for Pharmaceutical Research and Development (NIPRID) and Nigeria Institute for Medical Research (NIMR)?

The National Institute for Pharmaceutical Research and Development (NIPRD) is charged with not only developing pharmaceuticals but also evaluating the efficacy that every medication claims to have. Since 2005, we have been working with NIPRD, and if you go there now, you will see a special treatment centre there that we support through the US-funded PEPFAR programme, and we intend to continue to sustain that collaboration and expand it.

We have worked with them to look at the properties of some local herbs in the past and we will continue to do that. We believe that having the IRCE and the infrastructure in it will help foster that relationship and enhance the collaboration that we have in such a way that they can do more.

The Nigeria Institute for Medical Research (NIMR) is the overall medical research institute in Nigeria but is substantially underfunded and we have been collaborating with them for a long time. One of the TB reference labs that we have been able to help facilitate in the country is actually in NIMR, we have folks working directly with them.

When the IRCE infrastructure is ready and we move into the place, we will be like twins with NIMR because whatever we do, we need their collaboration.

How soon are you moving into the research centre?

We originally planned to move in by June 2020, but the coronavirus hit, and we had to stop work. Now we have rescheduled; so sometime between February and March 2021. The work is progressing very well and we are very confident that in the first quarter of 2021, we will be able to move into two buildings.

The cost is huge because we have to relocate a number of critical assets from the rented sites that we currently have. We have been trying to raise funds, and have been successful with some banks.

We are not doing the movement in one fell swoop. It is going to be in stages; for instance, we are going to move the laboratories first, it takes time to install all those equipment, calibrate them and make sure they are working.

What about access road to the centre?

One of the things we are forever grateful for is that we got that massive piece of land for almost nothing. With our relationship with the Federal Capital Territory Administration (FCTA), we hoped the FCTA will construct the access road, particularly since that area is currently under development in terms of basic infrastructural development – roads, sewage, all those things.

The FCT minister visited the site, maybe because of resources the project never got awarded, given that we would be moving in soon, we had to gather some resources internally and construct the road. The road is being constructed now but funded by IHVN directly.

How has your institute helped the country’s response against COVID-19?

We distributed universal safety precaution materials to all the facilities we collaborate with, our staff in the fields and our volunteers.

We also supported some treatment centres in Abuja with equipment and consumables and supplies to be able to cater to the general population. In terms of research, we are actively collaborating with pharmaceutical companies that may want to try some of the new therapies in Nigeria.

We have joined a network of study sites that will be trying some of the medications to see how effective they are on the Nigerian population.