The federal government has launched RNASwift, a diagnostic
kit, for the identification of the causal agent of COVID-19.
At a press conference on Tuesday, Alex Akpa,
director-general of National Biotechnology Development Agency (NABDA), the
agency that developed the kit, said the RNASwift test kit is an indigenous
diagnostic test kit designed, developed and validated in Nigeria for the
identification of the causal agent –SARS-Cov-2– which causes COVID-19.
Akpa said the RNASwift test kit will not only
revolutionalise Africa’s PCR-based COVID-19 testing but also expand the
capacity by at least, 50 times.
He also said it will equally reduce cost by over 500 percent
as compared to the conventional kit in use.
“This meets the demands of the Test Africa Initiative. The
kits will be produced in Nigeria, which is great news considering that it will
enable preference to be given to the testing needs of Africa,” he said.
“The need for the invention was conceived by the request
from the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (FMARD), to test
five million farmers and farmhands.
“This was to ensure that our food security chain was not
compromised by COVID-19.”
He said the diagnostic kit is “very accurate and sensitive’’
and competes favourably with conventional and commercially available kits for
the diagnosis of COVID-19.
“This is in addition to a careful choice of reagents that
are human and environmentally friendly in the development of the protocol for
the diagnostic kit,” Akpa said.
“In fact, the attributes of the RNASwift kits make it a
game-changer in the design and production of diagnostic kits for infectious diseases
in the face of an epidemic or a pandemic.”
He also said the project was made possible by the scientific
collaboration between NABDA, Nigerian Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), and
Nigerian Institute for Medical Research (NIMR).
In his speech at the briefing, Ogbonnaya Onu, minister of
science and technology, said he had tasked Nigerian scientists to come up with
a solution with a N36 million pledge.
Onu said Nigerians are creative and talented enough to
develop homegrown solutions to major challenges confronting the country, Africa
and the world, with the RNASwift test kit as an example.
“Today, the RNASwift extraction kit developed by Nigerian
scientists has capacity at an accurate, sensitive and affordable cost to detect
SARS-Cov2, the causative agent of COVID-19,” he said
“With the RNASwift test kit, we are going to test five
million farmers, and the new test kit will reduce cost drastically.”
He also said other African countries stand to benefit from
the test kits owing to its low cost.
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