Credit: Joan Salmon
Thanks to Mary Marshall for alerting me to this Daily Monitor report, with a Canadian angle: Ugandan doctor behind revolutionary Ebola diagnostic kit. Excerpt:
In a way, we consider ourselves as revolutionaries because we bring change, good one at that, to our societies through the knowledge we have gathered over the years. Nonetheless, achieving the full potential of that impact – including inspiring the younger generations and garnering the necessary resources and partnerships needed for moving our ideas from the laboratory to something that can be practicalised to help the public, is something only possible if we partner with the media,” says Dr Misaki Wayengera, a researcher and inventor of the Pan-Filovirus Rapid Diagnostic Test (Pan-filo-V RDT).
In 2014, when the Ebola epidemic broke out in West Africa, Dr Wayengera and his team were very pivotal in its control and he believes “as Africans, we can do more to solve our issues”.
This senior lecturer from the Departments of Pathology, Immunology and Molecular Biology at the College of Health sciences, Makerere University, is also a clinician in charge of the Unit of Genetics and Genomics where he caters for children with genetic disorders.
“As a medical doctor, I believe I should apply my knowledge for the betterment of my community. There is a sense in which we should appreciate that as doctors, we are merely custodians of medical knowledge for society,” he adds.
“To that effect, currently my team and I are developing the next generation of tuberculosis diagnostic tests, a potential HIV/Aids cure and the Ebola diagnostic kit.”
Gulu outbreak
In 2000, Dr Wayengera was in his second year as a medical student when Ebola broke out in Gulu and Masindi districts.
Over time, he has learnt that Ebola can be easily controlled through a quarantine. However, most outbreaks start in remote areas that lack laboratories and hospitals. In its early stages, he says, Ebola presents symptoms such as high temperature, body weakness, muscle and joint pains, and vomiting that are similar to other illnesses. And yet, specific diagnosis requires techniques of high sophistication which were not available within the village settings, putting both health workers and other community members at risk.
Ebola is a very high-risk pathogen (denoted class A) and at that time, samples were taken to laboratories in South Africa or the Centres for Disease Control (CDC) in the US and it took a minimum of two weeks before test results were returned, delays that lent opportunity to the spread of the epidemic.
“It was the first indicator of how an Ebola outbreak could socio-economically paralyse and render vulnerable an entire population. Dr Matthew Lukwiya along with many others died of something preventable,” says Dr Wayengera.
The need for speedy diagnostic got him thinking of what could help do the tests in a simple, affordable and yet rapid way.
“There were other such test kits like that of HIV and pregnancy. I knew we could do the same for Ebola. Nonetheless, we needed funding and the necessary skills. We also required partnerships with a biosafety level 4 facility.”
Although Dr Wayengera says a biosafety level 3 laboratory has since been built at the Uganda Virus Research Institute (UVRI) to help with such diagnosis tests, he emphasises that the appropriate laboratory needed for the study of such high-risk pathogens is a biosafety laboratory level 4 of which there are only two in Africa, and only one dedicated for such cases which is in South Africa. Following completion of his medical studies in 2004, Dr Wayengera got the opportunity to go for a bio-entrepreneurship training at the Medical and Related Sciences (MaRs) Discovery District at the University of Toronto.
“It was this training that exposed me to the expertise of studying the entire set of the pathogen DNA (genomes) and in 2007 I was able to identify the unique targets we are developing into an Ebola detector,” he says.
In 2008, in light of the frequent outbreaks of Ebola and Marburg in Uganda, and his awareness that these kinds of pathogens could be weaponised and used for bioterror, he reached out to President Museveni and relayed the need to prepare for any future outbreaks, including the need for funding to get the detectors ready.
