Drug Discovery Prof. E. O. Ogbadoyi
Vaccine Development Prof. N. U. Adabara
Nanotechnology Prof. A. S. Abdulkareem
Bioinformatics Prof. B. Awojoyegbe
Contact Director
08033883658
E-mail: infocgeb@futminna.edu.ng
Science and Technology Education Post Basic (STEP-B) Project is the Federal Ministry of Education Project funded through facilities from the World Bank. The Project in FUT, Minna comprises three segments namely:
- ICT Infrastructure Development Project.
- Innovators of Tomorrow Awards.
- Centre of Excellence Grant.
The centre is one of the eleven (11) different projects in various strategic areas of science and technology aimed at creating world class research centres in the country. Federal University of Technology, Minna Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology is to focus initially on Drug and Vaccine Development. The grant application was packaged by three main proponents: Prof S.A Garba, (Vaccine component), Prof. Emmanuel Ogbadoyi (Drug, Phyto Medicine) and Prof Bamidele Awojoyogbe (Bioinformatics and Medical Imaging). The area of nanotechnology was later incorporated to the mandate of the centre.
The successful establishment of the Centre entailed sacrifices on the part of various Project Officers from the inception, robust support from the University Administration via counterpart funding and timely intervention of various stakeholders in the World Bank and Project Secretariat offices. These collective efforts have resulted in what is available today in the Centre. The Centre is well equipped with state-of-the-art facilities as presented below and we are delighted that the Centre has considerable equipment which have enhanced our national and global ranking.
We are proud that we have not only fulfilled the set objectives in creating the Centre as the research culture in our university has been transformed significantly. We are now conducting researches that impact positively on our immediate environment and contributing to the global community via qualitative publications in high ranking world journals. The quality of research output now competes favourably in the global arena. This was achieved through investment in people, skills and research, and by exploiting the tremendous opportunities offered by the genomics and post-genomics era to use modern approach to vaccine and drug discovery and development. Other areas of innovation include;
- The Screen-to-Nature (STN) technology developed by GIBEX, our major collaborator in drug discovery from natural product. Using this technology, plants containing bioactive principles of interest were identified without going through the tedious, time consuming and costly in-vitro/ and or in-vivo screening to obtain primary hits.
- Application of Nanotechnology to deliver drug across the blood-brain barrier in the treatment of diseases that involve the central nervous system and other applications such as wastewater treatment and alternative energy development.
- Development of edible vaccines-plant based vaccines.
- Development of recombinant DNA vaccines, and developing host defence peptides as therapeutic agents.
- Using advanced mathematics and computing methods to build realistic simulation models of physiology and diseases.
