NAFDAC, OAU Join Oxford-Led £3.7m Project to Fight Fake Vaccines
The National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) and Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU) have joined a £3.7 million international research project led by the University of Oxford to develop better ways of detecting fake, degraded and substandard vaccines.
The three-year initiative, announced by NAFDAC Director-General, Prof. Mojisola Adeyeye, is funded through the United Kingdom’s Medical Research Council (MRC) Developmental Pathway Funding Scheme.
Other members of the research partnership include the UK Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), the University of East London, the Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit (MORU) in Thailand, and other global research institutions.
The project builds on the Vaccine Identity Evaluation (VIE) Consortium, which was created during the COVID-19 pandemic to tackle the growing challenge of falsified and poor-quality vaccines worldwide.
NAFDAC said the initiative would strengthen vaccine monitoring in Nigeria through improved post-market surveillance, testing of new vaccine screening technologies, laboratory assessment of vaccine batches and studies to identify the most cost-effective ways to verify vaccine quality.
“As Nigeria’s National Regulatory Authority, NAFDAC will play a central role in implementing the project by strengthening vaccine quality surveillance and supporting evidence-based regulatory decision-making,” the agency said.
The agency explained that the project expands on earlier research by Oxford’s Medicine Quality Research Group and its partners, where advanced laboratory methods were developed to identify fake and degraded vaccines within supply chains.
The latest phase will focus on improving those technologies and testing them under real-life conditions that reflect how vaccines are stored, transported and distributed in Nigeria.
The move comes amid rising concerns over the impact of counterfeit and substandard medical products on public health systems and economies.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that at least one in 10 medicines in low- and middle-income countries is either substandard or falsified, with countries losing billions of dollars annually due to poor-quality medical products.
For Nigeria, the issue is particularly important as the country continues to expand vaccination programmes, including malaria vaccination efforts, while spending significant resources on vaccine procurement.
The researchers hope the project will help improve vaccine verification, reduce the circulation of fake products, strengthen immunisation programmes and increase public confidence in vaccines.
NAFDAC, Nigeria’s regulatory agency responsible for ensuring the safety and quality of medicines, vaccines, food products and other regulated items, has recently increased its crackdown on counterfeit medical products.
Earlier this year, the agency seized millions of fake malaria medicines and cosmetic products worth billions of naira in Lagos, destroyed counterfeit drugs worth hundreds of millions of naira in Anambra, and issued alerts over falsified versions of some medicines circulating in the country.
Through the Oxford-led partnership, NAFDAC aims to further strengthen Nigeria’s ability to protect citizens from unsafe medical products and improve public health protection.
