By Abdulbasit Ajumobi
For years, Nigeria’s pharmaceutical conversation has largely focused on access. How can more medicines be made available? How can they become more affordable? How can the country reduce its dependence on imported medicines?
These questions remain important. But as Nigeria looks towards the future, Drug discovery researcher Abdulbasit Ajumobi believes another question deserves greater attention: when will Nigeria begin playing a bigger role in discovering the medicines of tomorrow?
According to him, Nigeria should not remain primarily a country that imports medicines developed elsewhere. The country has the people, health challenges and growing scientific institutions needed to gradually build a stronger drug discovery ecosystem of its own.
“Nigeria should not only ask how we can manufacture the medicines that already exist. We should also be asking how we can develop the medicines that do not exist yet,” Ajumobi said.
Drug discovery is often associated with large international pharmaceutical companies, sophisticated laboratories and years of expensive research. But at its heart, it begins with a much simpler question: is there a better way to treat a disease?
That question can lead scientists to investigate new molecules, study diseases more closely, test promising compounds and search for treatments that could eventually become medicines.
For Nigeria, Ajumobi believes that process should increasingly include problems that affect Nigerians and other African populations.
Nigeria faces a wide range of health challenges, from infectious diseases to cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and other conditions that place growing pressure on the country’s health system. Yet many of the medicines used to manage these conditions originate from research and development ecosystems outside Africa.This creates an opportunity as much as it creates a challenge.
“If Nigerian researchers understand the health problems affecting our communities, they should also have opportunities to participate in finding new solutions to those problems,” Ajumobi said.
That does not mean Nigeria needs to build a pharmaceutical industry capable of doing everything at once. It means starting strategically, with universities and research institutions identifying important health problems, scientists investigating potential drug candidates, pharmaceutical companies providing industry expertise, regulators supporting the development pathway and investors helping promising ideas move beyond early research.
The goal is to create a chain in which a promising scientific idea has somewhere to go.
This is one of the major gaps that Nigeria must address. A researcher can make an interesting discovery, publish a paper and move on to another project. But if there is no funding to continue the work, no system for protecting the discovery, no industrial partner to develop it and no pathway towards testing, the potential of that discovery may never be realised.
Ajumobi believes Nigeria needs to become better at identifying promising research and helping it move to the next stage.
“Discovery should not end with publication. A promising idea should have an opportunity to be tested, developed, protected and, where it proves successful, eventually turned into something that can benefit patients,” he said.
That will require a different approach to pharmaceutical research. Researchers need more than laboratory space; they need access to equipment, mentorship, funding and opportunities to collaborate with scientists in other disciplines. Young pharmacists and scientists also need to see drug discovery as a realistic career path.
Too often, talented young Nigerians are trained in science but find that opportunities to participate in high-level pharmaceutical research remain limited. The result is a cycle in which talent leaves, research remains fragmented and the country continues to depend heavily on technologies developed elsewhere.
A stronger drug discovery ecosystem could begin to change that. It could create opportunities for young scientists to work on meaningful research without having to build their entire careers outside the country, while also creating new research companies, attracting international partnerships, generating intellectual property and creating highly skilled jobs. Over time, it could produce medicines developed with African health needs in mind.
The economic argument is also significant. Drug discovery is not only about healthcare; it is also about knowledge, technology and ownership. A country that develops a new medicine does not simply gain a product. It gains scientific knowledge, intellectual property and capabilities that can generate value far beyond a single discovery.
This is why Ajumobi believes Nigeria’s pharmaceutical ambitions should extend beyond increasing local production.
“Manufacturing is important, but ownership of knowledge is even more powerful. If we can develop the capacity to discover and develop medicines, we are building something that cannot simply be imported in a box,” he said.
Nigeria does not have to compete with the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies on every front. It can identify areas where its researchers, institutions and health needs provide a reason to invest. It can focus on diseases that matter locally, build partnerships with international research institutions, learn from countries that have successfully developed pharmaceutical research industries and gradually build the expertise required to take promising ideas from early discovery towards real-world applications.
The country’s existing pharmaceutical manufacturing sector could also become part of this journey. A stronger relationship between researchers and manufacturers could create opportunities for locally discovered technologies to eventually move into development and production. The same companies that currently manufacture medicines could, over time, become partners in developing new ones.
That would represent a significant change in Nigeria’s pharmaceutical story. Instead of the journey ending when an imported medicine arrives at a Nigerian factory, the journey could begin much earlier, with Nigerian researchers asking whether a better medicine can be created in the first place.
Imagine a Nigerian scientist identifying a promising drug candidate in a local laboratory and another team investigating how it works. Imagine a pharmaceutical company becoming involved in its development, Nigerian researchers contributing to the studies needed to determine whether it is safe and effective, and the eventual medicine being manufactured in Nigeria and reaching patients across Africa.
That is not simply a story about a new drug. It is a story about scientific capability, jobs, investment, intellectual property and national confidence. Most importantly, it is a story about Nigeria becoming a participant in pharmaceutical discovery rather than remaining primarily a consumer of it.
Ajumobi believes that future should be approached with patience and ambition.
“Drug discovery takes time. It requires failure, persistence, investment and collaboration. But if we never build the capacity to begin, we will always depend on someone else to finish,” he said.
Nigeria’s pharmaceutical future should therefore not be measured only by how many medicines it manufactures today. It should also be measured by how many young scientists are being trained to discover tomorrow’s medicines, how many research ideas are being developed, how much pharmaceutical knowledge is being created and how many promising discoveries are finding a path towards patients.
The country may not discover the next blockbuster medicine tomorrow. But it can begin building the people, laboratories, companies and partnerships that make such a discovery possible.That is the real opportunity.
Nigeria should not wait for the next generation of medicines to arrive from somewhere else. It should begin building the capacity to discover them.
