The National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) has joined an international research consortium awarded a £3.7m grant by the United Kingdom’s Medical Research Council (MRC) to develop advanced technologies to detect substandard, degraded, and falsified vaccines.
The agency said the three-year project will strengthen vaccine quality surveillance in Nigeria through advanced screening technologies, routine laboratory testing and evidence-based research.
NAFDAC Director-General, Prof. Mojisola Adeyeye, disclosed this in a statement shared on the agency’s official X handle on Monday.
The project is led by the Medicine Quality Research Group at the University of Oxford and brings together NAFDAC, Obafemi Awolowo University, the UK Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), the University of East London, the Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit (MORU) in Thailand and other partners.
According to the agency, the initiative builds on the Vaccine Identity Evaluation (VIE) Consortium, which was established during the COVID-19 pandemic to address the growing global threat of substandard and falsified vaccines.
NAFDAC said the grant also expands earlier research by the University of Oxford’s Medicine Quality Research Group and its partners, which successfully adapted advanced scientific techniques to detect degraded and falsified vaccines within supply chains.
Adeyeye said the new phase of the project would further refine the technologies and evaluate their performance under near real-world conditions in Nigeria.
She added that, as Nigeria’s National Regulatory Authority, NAFDAC would coordinate the project’s implementation in the country by strengthening vaccine quality surveillance and supporting evidence-based regulatory decisions.
The agency said the project would also generate critical evidence to support the deployment of screening technologies that verify vaccine quality throughout the supply chain.
(The Whistler)