The Missing Buyer

There is a familiar complaint about Nigerian research, and it is usually directed at researchers. Papers get published, results sit on shelves, and nothing reaches a market. The revised National Biotechnology Policy 2026 makes commercialisation a central objective, which implies the same diagnosis.

The Director-General of NBRDA offered a different one on national television recently, and it is worth taking seriously because it locates the problem somewhere less convenient. The historical obstacle, he argued, has been the absence of guaranteed off-takers. An inventor who patents a process in isolation, with no committed buyer, has produced an asset that goes nowhere. Not because the science failed. Because there was no second party to the transaction.

That reframing is worth following through, because it changes what has to be built.

The conditions are worse than the complaint suggests

Nigeria's gross domestic expenditure on research and development has been reported at around 0.28 percent of GDP, against a world average nearer 1.11 percent and an African Union target of one percent. Some assessments put the figure lower still, at 0.22 percent.

A 2026 review of Nigeria's research commercialisation ecosystem, synthesising 47 government documents and international reports, identified the same structural picture: chronic underfunding, weak university-industry linkages, the absence of professional technology transfer offices, and regulatory ambiguity. Those are institutional gaps rather than motivational ones. A researcher at a Nigerian university who wants to commercialise typically has no technology transfer office to route through, no established path to a licensee, and no institutional counterpart whose job it is to find one.

Research Spend as a Share of GDP

A commercialisation mandate rests on a research base funded at roughly a quarter of the global average.

Nigeria, as reportedMeasured0.28%

Nigeria, on lower assessmentsMeasured0.22%

African Union targetTarget, not met1.00%

World averageMeasured1.11%

It has worked when the buyer existed

The counterexample is instructive, and it comes from agriculture rather than health.

Nigeria has released and commercialised three transgenic crops: Bt cotton, TELA maize engineered for drought tolerance and insect resistance, and pod-borer resistant cowpea. On the cowpea, the DG described farmers previously spraying up to eight to ten times per season against pod borer, with heavy losses, and Nigeria now producing sufficient cowpea domestically.

The reason that pathway closed is worth isolating. Seed systems have an existing distribution channel, an existing regulatory route through the biosafety agency and the seeds council, and a buyer who is definitionally present, which is the farmer who plants next season. The demand did not have to be created. It was already there and already transacting.

Genomics has no equivalent. There is no established channel through which a Nigerian genomic dataset or diagnostic reaches a paying user, no reimbursement pathway, and no institutional buyer whose budget line it fits.

What a buyer looks like in genomics

If the off-taker analysis is right, then building the demand side is the work. Four candidates exist, in ascending order of difficulty.

Clinical diagnostics with a reimbursement route. Oncology panels, pharmacogenomic testing, carrier and newborn screening. These have identified users, defined clinical utility, and in principle a payer. In Nigeria the payer question routes through the health insurance authority and out-of-pocket expenditure, and neither currently has a line for genomic testing. That is a policy decision rather than a scientific one.

Public health surveillance. Pathogen genomics has an institutional buyer in the form of the national public health institute, and the operational case was demonstrated during COVID-19. Human genomics has no equivalent standing buyer.

Research access. International consortia and pharmaceutical companies pay for access to well-governed, well-characterised cohorts. This is the model underlying FinnGen in Finland, where a national resource is funded by a consortium of pharmaceutical companies. It requires the resource to exist first, at credible scale, with governance a compliance function will accept.

Domestic biomanufacturing. The DG described collaborative arrangements with international technical partners and indigenous firms for local insulin production. Genomic data feeds this only indirectly, but it is the endpoint that turns a data resource into industrial capacity rather than a licensing arrangement.

Notice that three of the four depend on infrastructure that does not yet exist, and the fourth depends on a payer decision nobody has made. The commercialisation problem in genomics is not downstream of the research. It runs alongside it.

The five things that would change it

Dr. Abdulrazak Ibrahim of the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa set out five priorities on the same broadcast, and they hold up as a checklist.

Fund downstream product development and validation, not only exploratory research. Equip shared laboratories, bioinformatics hubs and functional biotechnology parks. Let private industry drive commercial ventures, with agencies facilitating, coordinating and regulating rather than operating. Streamline patent processing and regulatory pathways. Retain and invest in scientists and bio-entrepreneurs rather than exporting them.

To which we would add a sixth, from where we sit. Build the data infrastructure before the data exists. Consent systems, registries, custody and access control are cheap relative to sequencing capacity and impossible to retrofit. A cohort assembled without them is a cohort no serious collaborator can license and no regulator will approve for secondary use.

Six Priorities for Commercialisation

Five were set out on the broadcast by Dr. Abdulrazak Ibrahim of the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa. The sixth is our own addition.

Five, set out on the broadcast

1. 01Fund downstream product development and validation, not only exploratory research.
2. 02Equip shared laboratories, bioinformatics hubs and functional biotechnology parks.
3. 03Let private industry drive commercial ventures, with agencies facilitating, coordinating and regulating rather than operating.
4. 04Streamline patent processing and regulatory pathways.
5. 05Retain and invest in scientists and bio-entrepreneurs rather than exporting them.

A sixth, added by Basani

06Build the data infrastructure before the data exists. Consent systems, registries, custody and access control are cheap relative to sequencing capacity and impossible to retrofit.

The uncomfortable part

There is a version of commercialisation policy that produces the wrong thing. If the only available buyer for Nigerian genomic data is a foreign pharmaceutical company, and the infrastructure holding that data is foreign-operated, then commercialisation means the same arrangement Nigeria already has with its biological samples, conducted at higher volume and with better paperwork.

The policy's own framing guards against this, in its emphasis on domestic manufacturing capacity and on Nigeria not remaining a consumer of imported biotechnology. But the guard has to be built into the infrastructure rather than asserted in the document. Where the data is held, under whose law, and who controls access are the mechanisms that determine whether commercialisation compounds domestically or leaks.

That is not an argument against commercialising. It is an argument about the order of operations.