From the UK to Nigeria: Mahmoud Maïna's challenge to establish a stem cell biobank in Yoba State

"We are working on something very transformative: establishing an open-access stem cell biobank in Nigeria to answer questions on population-specific differences to diseases," declares Mahmoud Maïna to News Tank on 04/06/2025. He is a neuroscientist specialising in Alzheimer’s disease at the University of Sussex (UK) and has received a Wellcome Trust Fund Career and Development Award to establish a stem cell biobank of Alzheimer’s patients of African ancestry in Yobe State, Nigeria.

This new phase in Maïna’s career is filled with economic, academic, and security challenges. He explains to News Tank the reasons behind his move and his goals for this new research project.

"During my post-doctoral research in the UK, I realised that the models we used to study the disease were mostly composed of patients of European background", he states. Mahmoud Maïna emphasises that "less than 2% of genetic studies include Africans".

According to him, the main challenge in establishing his project in Nigeria is "to prove and demonstrate that we can do world-class research in low-resource regions.…