The federal government has stated that Nigeria’s non production of active pharmaceutical ingredients, APIs, is intolerable. This was disclosed by the minister of state for health, Hon. Joseph Ekwumankama, during the International Scientific Workshop jointly organized by the West African Postgraduate College of Pharmacists, WAPCP, and the Nigerian Institute for Pharmaceutical Research and Development, NIPRD.
The minister who stated that all the APIs being used in the manufacturing of medicines in Nigeria are imported from India, China, the USA and Germany, lamented that such practice is taking a huge toll on Nigeria’s scarce foreign exchange and hinted that the importation of APIs will henceforth cease, to enable Nigeria leverage on the possibilities that abound for it in the areas of pharmaceutical manufacturing.
“The situation where there is no single pharmaceutical company that produces any APIs or pharmaceutical excipients locally is no longer tolerable. All of the APIs used by the industries in Nigeria are imported from India, China, the USA and Germany, and large amounts of the country’s scarce foreign exchange earnings are spent on their importation,” stated the minister.
The minister further decried the lack of access to quality medicines and healthcare provision to a large chunk of the Nigerian population despite the deliberate and direct funding intervention made to close the exposed gaps.
“Despite appreciable progress in the Nigerian Healthcare Sector within the last 24 months, largely due to deliberate and direct funding interventions to strengthen the sector arising from exposed gaps seen during the COVID-19 pandemic, there are still significant barriers to access to quality medicines and healthcare provision to the population,” noted the minister.
And while showing the minister the varieties of innovative medicines synthesized by the Institute, Director General of NIPRD, Dr. Peter Obi Adigwe, disclosed that the Institute has ventured into the manufacturing of pharmaceutical variants that were hitherto obtained from Europe and Asia. One of the products sampled by the DG was Eucalyptus oil which he said was very effective for inhalation therapy and muscle massage.
He further disclosed that the variant used in the manufacture of the therapeutic oil was obtained from Kaduna where there are thousands of the Eucalyptus tree, adding that the Nigerian variants are of even higher quality than the ones from the other continents.
The DG also disclosed that the Institute has developed medicines to cure sickle cell anaemia from a proprietary blend of four different plants.
“This is the one that is very popular. We developed this for sickle cell anaemia. It comes from four different plants which are combined using the proprietary blend that were developed here in the Institute, and this has gone on to phase 2 clinical trial and it’s actually been prescribed by conventional practice,” disclosed the DG.
An API is the biologically active component of a drug product such as tablet or capsule. It is the primary ingredient of such products.
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