‘At least N2bn is required yearly for optimal medical research funding’

The Nigerian Institute of Medical Research, an institution under the Federal Ministry of Health received a paltry N23 million last year to fund research activities in the country, a sum of money Babtunde Salako, director-general of the organisation told BusinessDay’s  Anthonia Obokoh is insufficient to fully fund medical research in the country.

Tell us a little about this institute?

Nigerian institute of medical research conducts research for the purpose of prevention and control of diseases endemic in Nigeria.

So we are focused on diseases of public health importance, diseases that is causing significant mortality and morbidity among the Nigeria population.

The institute has been in existence in various stages since 1920.It started as a Yellow Fever Vaccine Centre where the vaccine is tested as part of research to determine their efficacy.

What areas of health research are you advocating for improved capacity?

We are looking to build a very strong cancer research programme. We just completed the building for the cancer research Centre, but funding is something that is in very short supply.

We are also looking at the Nigerian disease landscape as it is obvious that cancer causes a lot of mortality and morbidity especially amongst people of middle age.

So it is one of the reasons we may have very low life expectancy because most cancer really will comes about the middle age and since it is a disease that has no clear cut treatment in many cases and because of late presentation of patients to their doctors causes a lot of mortality

So the institute is in the fore front of cancer research to define which of these cancers cause significant mortality and morbidity in Nigeria.

We try to find out if there are things peculiar to Nigerians that may be promoting cancer, we look at the human behaviour, epidemiology of the diseases, presentation, and type the treatment.

These are all the area where the institute should play significant role in determining how to move forward.

We are doing little research in cervical cancer and the theology of human papillomavirus even though it is not as big as we wish for it to be.

We are trying to work with external bodies and researchers to attract research fund from elsewhere to see if we can collaborate and network and from then promote cancer research in Nigeria.

One of the areas of focus for us this year in our budget, is actually cancer research, but I am not sure how much funding the government is going to put into that.

What is the biggest challenge to medical research in Nigeria?

It is funding. Judging from the kind of funding we have been getting in the past, if government could start with N2 billion on a yearly basis for it will go a long way because we have so many areas to focus on.

For example, look at Lassa fever, it keeps coming on yearly, but we really have not done anything significant. Yes we are good in kind of stop gap approach, I think we really need to put a lot of money into the Lassa fever research, so we can not only look at the virus, vector, population on habitat that promote the infection itself because prevention is better than cure, before we talk about treatment effectiveness of the virus, vaccine production and all of that.

Polio appears to be on the way out of Nigeria, but I think that to completely eradicate it, we need to pump money into the total eradication of polio research. It can disappear in five to ten years, if we continue to do surveillance to be sure that once it is out, it is out completely.

How much is usually allocated to this institution?

Last year we had a budgetary allocation of about N56million, and that included research but only N23million was released so that leaves us with about N8 – N9 million for research.

I have heard people say go and look for external funding, and I say yes, it is one of our priorities to build capacity in the area of grant writing, award winning and extending our network and collaboration with other similar institutes, then we can get in some fund, but do not forget that the fund that come often are for specific interests, and this interests has to be that of the organisation providing funding, not our own, unless our interest agree with theirs.

But even then if our interest agrees, the particular area where Nigeria needs may not be where they want, and so there is still a need for the country to define its own priority and fund that priority.

So how much funding is required to properly fund a cancer research project?

Like I said, there’s no amount of money that you put into research that will be adequate, that’s why I was saying give us minimum of N2billion, then we can share and say okay we are going to put half a billion on cancer research, or a quarter of a billion on certain communicable diseases or non-communicable diseases.

When we look at cancer research, for now we talk about breast cancer, prostate cancer, cervical cancer, the killers of people in all over the world but much more in Nigeria and some side of Africa.

Majority of our problem is not only that of inadequate research, but also that of access to treatment, because we don’t have outlets where people can get cancer treatments.

What research does is to continue to look at the available treatment, their effectiveness, and search for new treatments, and of course add information to preventive ways so that people who don’t have it will not have it, and people who have can manage appropriately.

So if we have fund for now, we will like to devote say maybe between 150million for this year for cancer research.

And what we normally will do, we’ll prioritize amongst those cancers, the leading causes of death, and then we sit down and design the needs, whether the needs will be in the area of new treatments, or the needs will be in the area of the effectiveness of some preventive strategy, and we can say ok we’re giving 50million to this area, and we can ask people to come up with their brilliant ideas on how we can stem the tide.

How equipped is this institute?

Equipment has to do with funding. The institute is lucky because we have some development partners, majorly the CDC (Center for Disease Control), and AIDS Prevention Initiative in Nigeria (APIN). Currently we have another agency called FHI 360, but both of them work for the CDC, and they are the ones maintaining our HIV research clinic and service.

I think there is an institute of human biology also in Abuja, working with us on our Tuberculosis laboratory. We have capacity for what they call bound safety level 3 laboratories, which provides us with the ability to work on resistant tuberculosis, and some other pathogens. That is what also confer on us our being national reference lab on tuberculosis.

We have all the required equipment to make diagnosis of TB and resistant TB, we are just doing a PPP unit, our x-ray unit has been spoilt over the years, but since I came, we started the PPP unit, so we are having an x-ray unit here to back up the TB lab, and we have one of the latest mechanism of making diagnosis of tuberculosis. So we are good to go in that area.

We have again a very vibrant human virus free lab, instrumentally; we are good for now only in HIV, hepatitis B and C, and human papillomavirus.

Recently we invited the head of the polio lab in the college of medicine, university of Ibadan, to come and see how we can bring on board polio virus research in our human viable lab and some other retroviruses.