National Biotechnology Development Agency
NABDA
NABDA – The Agency was established under the aegis of the Federal Ministry of Science and Technology to implement the policy that is aimed at promoting, coordinating, and setting research and development priority in biotechnology for Nigeria.
Our Three Main Focus
Branches of Biotechnology
Biotechnology has applications in four major industrial areas, including health care (medical), crop production and agriculture, non-food (industrial) uses of crops and other products (e.g. biodegradable plastics, vegetable oil, biofuels), and environmental uses.
Medical Biotechnology
- Use of organisms for the production of drugs or antibiotics
- Use of stem cells for damage tissue cure or sometimes to grow entire organ by the process of regeneration. This is referred to as stem cell therapy
- To develop new tests to diagnose, to confirm or to predict certain diseases
- Gene therapy
White (gray) Biotechnology
- Production of new chemicals
- Production of plastic substitutes (biopolymers)
- Development of new kinds of vehicle fuels
- Fibers for clothing
Green Biotechnology
It can be referred to as Agriculture biotechnology. It is applied to agricultural processes like the production of insect, pest, and disease resistant crop varieties (transgenic crop plants), disease resistant animals.
Blue biotechnology
It includes processes in aquatic environments, like to control unwanted growth of noxious water-borne organisms, to protect aquatic members from some of the diseases by increasing their resistance to the respective disease. Application of blue biotechnology is relatively rare.
Bioinformatics
It is a fantastic union of computer and biotechnology. Bioinformatics assists in rapid organization and analysis of biological and genetic data. It is applied in various areas, like functional genomics, structural genomics, and proteomics, for various purposes like drug and molecular medicine development, gene therapy, the creation of bio-weapons, improvement in crop plants for nutritional quality, resistance to disease, pest, drought etc.