I usually lock the class door when I start teaching. Latecomers wait outside. After a while, I let them in. Then I lock it again. Two groups revealed. Those who come late. And those who come very late.
That was how I discovered a chronic late comer, let’s call her Jennifer. Jennifer was always among the very late comers. I stopped her after class one day to know the mystery behind her chronic lateness to class.
Her reasons were copious!
She works in a hair salon. She does not own a bed. She sleeps in the shop. She wakes before dawn. Sweeps. Bathes beside the building. Sells fruits by the roadside before getting ready for class. Then walks to school from a considerable distance.
She saves her salary for her school fees. She is still behind. Her parents are far away in the village. Nobody sent her to school. Nobody is paying. Jennifer is doing this alone. As the then director of students’ affairs, I reached out to the next of kin in her student file. All her story checks out.
The World Health Organization says education is a right. Jennifer mentioned nobody would give her that right. So, she decided to claim it herself. Every morning. Every struggle. For the foreseeable future.
Clock that Jennifer story. We’ll use it soon.
Let me take you for a ride. Let’s move away from Edo State and the whole Jennifer story for a while, let’s go beyond the Atlantic. Somewhere in Philadelphia.
In February 2025, a baby named KJ barely seven months old received a drug that had never existed before. Not just never been approved. Never existed. Scientists at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania designed a bespoke CRISPR gene-editing therapy from scratch, tailored to KJ’s own unique genetic mutation, and delivered it to his liver cells within six months of his diagnosis.
The New England Journal of Medicine ran the paper. The researchers called it “CRISPR on demand.” And somewhere in the world, the rest of us kept doing what we do.
That same January, Vertex Pharmaceuticals got approval for Journavx (suzetrigine). Journavx is the first genuinely new class of pain medicine in over twenty-five years. It blocks pain signals before they reach the brain, with no addictive potential, no opioid risk. For a world still counting overdose deaths by the tens of thousands annually, this was not just a drug. It was a small, hopeful argument against despair.
Now, I am not here to make anyone feel bad. I understand that drug development is not a weekend project, and that the infrastructure behind these breakthroughs are decades of institutional investment, regulatory architecture, and private capital. And none of that is conjured overnight. But I am also not here to pretend that we are keeping pace with a world that very clearly has decided to work.
Actually, we do lack the funds to carryout anything close to those researches mentioned. The KJ project mentioned above costs about one million dollars. Yes, and that’s about one point four billion naira. We definitely don’t have that.
But one last ride, please. There is the Insilico Medicine, a Hong Kong-based AI biotech company that did something almost philosophically startling. The company let an artificial intelligence both discover a disease target and design the drug to hit it. This was done entirely for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a lung disease with no cure. In June 2025, Nature Medicine published the Phase 2a results. The drug, now called rentosertib, improved lung function in IPF patients within just twelve weeks.The world is not stagnant, and neither, to be fair, are we. But our pace of movement is not commensurate with the urgency. The honest question is not whether innovation is happening globally, it clearly is, at a breathtaking clip. The honest question is: how do we localize it? How do we build the conditions in which a KJ in Lagos or Ondo or Abuja has the same chance as a KJ in Philadelphia? How do we stop being only consumers of scientific innovations and become contributors to them?The answers are not exotic. No, it is not the government. It is in us. We need to change our focus. Especially pharmacists!Check PSN for example. I doubt if there is a section of PSN funds geared towards research. One solution is to do just that. An arm of the executive can liaise with faculties and departments to create mechanisms to help researching pharmacists. For example, the PSN annual accounts for the year ended August 31, 2025 tell a story. Not a scandalous one, but a quietly uncomfortable one. A story of a profession that knows the language of science but has not yet fully committed to speaking it.The annual conference alone generated a surplus of ₦121.8 million. Impressive. But scan the expenditure column and a picture emerges that deserves gentle scrutiny. Entertainment and dinner gulped ₦23.1 million. Exhibition canopies and chairs cost ₦63.9 million. Hotel expenses reached ₦60.6 million. Photograph and video coverage took ₦9.6 million. Plaques and trophies added another ₦803,000. These are not crimes. Conferences must run. Guests must eat. But these numbers sit in a document produced by the same profession watching the world develop AI-designed drugs, bespoke gene therapies, and first-in-class pain medicines largely without Nigerian fingerprints on any of them.The ₦23 million spent on one conference dinner could seed a competitive research grant. The ₦9.6 million on photography could fund a pharmacogenomics pilot study. The ₦63.9 million on canopies and chairs could establish a modest but functional drug research partnership with a Nigerian university.None of this is to say PSN does not work hard. It does. The surplus figures suggest an organization that manages its finances with reasonable competence. But competence at administration is not the same as ambition for the profession. The question is not whether PSN can organize a conference. Clearly, it can. The question is whether Nigeria pharmacists are ready to organize a future.Back to Jennifer. I did not pay her fees. I need money too. I did not give her a house. I need one too. But I did two things. I told Jennifer she has the right to open my class door whenever she arrives late. And I promise to tell her story to the faculty and the management. I did. They gave her a special resumption time and got a few financial supports here and there. Sometimes you cannot fix the whole problem. But you can open the door. Make it better. Instead of asking PSN, where is the next party, sorry conference? Let us ask, what research are we sponsoring this year?Just like Jennifer. We need to survive one way or another. Let’s sponsor the best we can. And hopefully, one day, we get a better more robust funding that brings out the star in our researching pharmacists. But till we find that, PSN can be like Dr. Ezekiel, opening the door for every young aspiring pharmacist who want to try. Instead of reaching out to companies to sponsor conferences, luncheons or dinners, we can reach out to sponsor any stellar research by pharmacists in the universities. Create a scheme or platform that can sift through the different researches and pick one or two to sponsor yearly. In a few years, we’ll have a similar project to KJ. Drug development does not happen overnight. But the night is only short to those who are sleeping. When you are not, it is a grueling 12hrs marathon. The government is not coming. Foreign aids are shrinking – no thanks to Donald J. Trump. The best we can do is to self-sponsor. And PSN can lead the way. As a young lecturer, it hurts my mind to think my research stops as soon as I publish a paper or present it at a conference. It hurts. I hope we can make it work, with or without the government. No matter how slowly but with better speed than we currently have.
Ezekiel Efeobhokhan
Pharmacist.
Edo State. Nigeria.