Salako told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Lagos on Thursday that NIMR had the expertise who had perfected the techniques, having produced various diagnostics kits.
He noted that case detection was key to reducing the burden of diseases through testing, adding that NIMR was able to contribute significantly to the fight against COVID-19 through its test kits.
” Before COVID-19, we sent three of our researchers to China to learn pathogen identification and we also sent two to Senegal where we used to take samples, to learn what they are doing.
” They came back before COVID-19 broke out in China. We wrote to them and they sent 200 samples of their diagnostic kits to us and we started testing for COVID-19 before the first case was detected in the country.
“So, our researchers created an MRNA extraction kit and went ahead to produce another one that works with a PCR and that was the beginning of NIMR’s fame.
“We tested over 60,000 Nigerians through our drive-in and…
Source: News Agency of Nigeria
