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Glory Ife
The Nigerian Institute of Medical Research (NIMR) in collaboration with African Centre for Excellence in Neglected Tropical Diseases and Forensic Biotechnology (ACENTDFB) has entered into partnership to train biologist on molecular techniques and research.
The 5-day training workshop taking place at the Biomedical Training and Cancer Research Center, Lagos has as its theme; “Identification of Trypanosomes by Conventional PCR and qPCR.”
Declaring the workshop open, the Deputy Director General, Nigeria Institution of Medical Research, Dr Nkiruka Odenekwe, said, this days we are tending towards personalised medicine but it is only with the knowledge of molecular biology we can achieved that all over the world.
According to him, with personalized medicine and with the knowledge of molecular biology, organism causing a particular disease can be identified and with the right drugs be treated.
“As of now most of the diseases are being treated with drugs that have multiple activities cells and they are not specific as most of them are generalized. Take tor example, the anti tumour drugs we have, when they are killing the tumour cells they are also destroying rapid growing normal cells.
“That is why some people if they are on chemotherapy they usually lose their hair because the drugs was specific or personalise to the glide but with trypanosomes, which is what molecular biology is all about. You can identify the particular gene that is the problem and then address it without personalised drugs and without destroying other normal cells.”
Explaining the lack of molecular biologist in the country, he said: “With the huge population in Nigeria we still lack molecular biology Training people is not easy and people need to be enlightened.
“More so, most of our children when are going into the university, are not well counsel with the area of needs and unfortunately they are being driven by irrelevant things like money and they don’t really think of what they can contribute to the country.”
On her part, coordinator ACENTDFB, Dr Stella Smith said, Nigeria stand to gain a lot because, it will aid in the identification of organism causing diseases. Again, you can get a DNA and identify the organism directly from water samples, so you see; it makes life a lot easy as well as improves diagnosis.
“The idea of the workshop however, is to increase the number of molecular biologist in the country firstly and then to make people interested in molecular biology techniques. In turn, they too can go ahead to also train others from what they have learnt,” she added.
