The Moroccan Association for Advanced Sciences, Innovation and Research (MASCIR) will soon put on the market the first African-manufactured kits to diagnose breast cancer and leukaemia, a move that will cut costs and waiting times for patients in Morocco and the wider African continents, wrote the UK newspaper the Guardian.
“The price of the kit can be double that of what it would cost to manufacture it locally. It is also a long process. It can take weeks or months for the kits to arrive,” the Guardian quoted Hassan sefrioui, a MASCIR executive board member, as saying.
MASCIR, an offshoot of the Mohammed VI Polytechnic University has been conducting research on the kits since 2010, Sefrioui said, adding that Leukaemia tests have been tested on 400 people in Morocco.
Diagnosis for such diseases used to take time as samples had to be sent to France for analysis prolonging and delaying treatment, Sefrioui said.
“But with locally manufactured test kits, we can get results within hours,” he said.
During the pandemic, MASCIR developed Covid diagnostic kits, which were sold in Senegal, Tunisia, Côte d’Ivoire and Rwanda. Sefrioui said the cancer tests could also be available to those countries, the Guardian recalled.