The National University of Science and Technology (NUST) has opened a regional biobank to collect, store and manage samples for research supporting new medicines and vaccines.
Named the NUST Institute of Immunopharmacology and Biobanking, the facility aims to become a leading African centre for vaccine innovation, immunopharmacology and clinical research to fight infectious diseases.
The institute was launched on Monday, 26 January, at NUST’s Professor Phineas Mogorosi Makhurane Technovation Centre.
At the launch, Professor Francesca Mutapi, co-director of the Global Health Academy at the University of Edinburgh, said the biobank would help develop cheaper drugs and vaccines for Zimbabwe and address Africa’s health challenges. She said:
“One of the most important advantages of a biobank is that it can be used to develop diagnostics, drugs and vaccines in-country.
“An example is our work on bilharzia, the number one disease that affects children in Africa after malaria, where TIBA (Tackling Infections to Benefit Africa) is working on developing a diagnostics that work for a specific country so that vaccines can be produced in that particular nation.”
According to Mutapi, making drugs locally offers benefits such as fewer regulatory hurdles compared with imports. She said:
“When a particular drug is made in Zimbabwe for Zimbabweans, we don’t have to test it over and over again to see if it will work for the local populations, thereby shortening time spent on research and ultimately production.
“A drug might be good in the laboratory but turn out to be a bad product in the field, as seen by some interventions that are developed in Western countries, but fail to work in Africa.
“Those medicines are usually expensive as the process of producing and testing them costs a lot of money, so pharmaceutical companies have to recoup the costs by making the drugs expensive.”
Mutapi said that by manufacturing medicines locally, the overall cost to patients is reduced, improving access to healthcare and easing the financial burden on families.
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