LASU lecturer wins world virology award

A lecturer within the College of Science, Lagos State College (LASU), Ojo, AbdulAzeez Anjorin, has gained the International Virus Community (GVN) 2023 Coaching Scholarship and Award.

Based on the college’s Centre for Data and Public Relations (CIPR), Mr Ajorin will attend a brief Primary and Translational Virology course on the College of Maryland and Johns Hopkins College College of Public Well being Baltimore, in the USA of America.

Mr Ajorin, an award-winning researcher and Performing Head of the Division of Microbiology at LASU, has additionally been chosen among the many Bacterial and Viral Bioinformatics Useful resource Centre (BV-BRC) 2023 Trainees on the Argonne Nationwide Laboratory, Chicago, Lemont Illinois, USA.

This can be a welcome growth for Nigeria, a rustic endemic to Lassa Fever, COVID-19, Yellow Fever, and different infectious ailments.

Scenario of viral ailments in Nigeria

The Nigeria Centre for Illness Management (NCDC), the nationwide public well being institute for Nigeria, has been on the forefront of battling viral ailments and defending Nigerians by coordinating public well being preparedness, surveillance, laboratory, and response capabilities for all infectious ailments.

Lassa Fever, now extra endemic in Nigeria, has been spreading in a number of states throughout the nation’s six geopolitical zones and the federal capital territory.

Based on the newest state of affairs report on the NCDC web site, from week 1 to week 23, 2023, 164 deaths have been reported with a case fatality price (CFR) of 17.1 per cent, which is decrease than the CFR for a similar interval in 2022 (20.0 per cent)

Additionally, in accordance with the World Well being Organisation (WHO), earlier than the decline in COVID-19 infections in Nigeria, there have been 266,675 confirmed circumstances, with 3,155 deaths as of 28 June.

To deal with the problem of Lassa fever and different lethal viruses, in accordance with Mr Anjorin, “Nigeria wants a complete understanding of the fundamentals, genomics, proteomics, molecular docking for drug design and vaccine manufacturing for every of the viral aetiologies, that’s the causative brokers.”

He mentioned a part of the coaching classes centered on utilizing the BV-BRC command-line interface for programmatic search and retrieval of knowledge that may help the nation to analyse, in actual time, 1000’s of details about the microbes inflicting completely different ailments, together with Lassa fever, for Nigeria and Africa as an entire.

“Superior steps to understanding the incursion of ailments into and out of Nigeria have been improved upon by way of the properly designed and completely mentioned phylogenetic and comparative genomic analyses, sequence meeting and annotation, subspecies classification, protein construction, surveillance knowledge exploration, and transcriptomic evaluation, whereas the trending world metagenomic knowledge evaluation was detailed for immediate evaluation of such knowledge emanating from Nigeria and different components of the world,” Mr Anjorin defined.

Data sharing

Based on LASU, the coaching will improve the capability growth of Mr Anjorin for data sharing amongst college members.

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LASU famous that in an award letter issued and signed by Christian Brechot, President of GVN and Robert Gallo, the Co-founder and Worldwide Advisor for the organisation. It famous that “the scholarship coaching will likely be on the basic, translational, and medical facets of viruses related to human well being.”

It added that the course may also contain interplay with famend medical virology leaders, trade companions, policymakers and program officers from the Johns Hopkins College of Public Well being and the Nationwide Institutes of Well being (NIH).

Talking on its advantages to the college, LASU mentioned the scholarship may also assist in the coaching of each undergraduate and postgraduate college students “within the space of genomics and metagenomics utilizing the newly developed bioinformatics instruments by the USA Argonne Nationwide Laboratory, Chicago, Lemont Illinois, and the talents from the GVN coaching on the Ivy leagues.”