Professor Maurice Iwu, a former Independent Electoral Commission (INEC) Chairman and currently the Chairman, Imo State government instituted COVID-19 management committee, is a medical scientist and majored in pharmacognosy at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.
Besides the all-important official positions, he is the President, Bioresources Development Group (BDG); International Center for Ethnomedicine and Drug Development (InterCEDD), Nsukka, and Bioresources Institute of Nigeria at Umunna, Onu-Imo, Okigwe, Imo State. In this interview, Iwu speaks, among other things, on the evaluation of local manufactured drugs and appreciation.
Whenever your name is mentioned, people mostly think of your participation in election management. But it turns out that you are a pharmacognosy and not a political scientist. How did it happen?
It happens sometimes in life that certain events define you or form part of the public perception of your identity, some taking place only for brief moments, even seemingly inconsequential roles, and others are so impactful that they cannot be ignored. I am a scientist. I was a professor of pharmacognosy at UNN and I have been a research scientist for most part of my life.
You have done some studies on pharmacognosy. Can you let us into some of these studies?
My work is on the development of drugs and cosmetics from natural products with special focus on neglected tropical diseases, emergent infections and orphan diseases. The drug discovery projects include chemical isolation and characterization of naturally occurring compounds and subjecting them to a battery of bioassays for the identification of potentially useful drug-lead molecules.
Our approach is the use of a network of eminent scientists and leading laboratories to target particular diseases, especially neglected tropical, emergent diseases and orphan diseases such as Leishmaniasis, Ebola virus, Dengue fever virus, Chikungunya virus (CHIKV), Coronavirus and Tacaribe virus; and chronic metabolic diseases such diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular diseases.
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My work is done primarily through the Bioresources Development Group (BDG), an independent biosciences research and development organization that cultivates, processes and produces medicines, nutraceuticals and cosmetics from natural products. BDG is probably the largest private research organization in Africa devoted to natural products research and development.
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