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| Engr. Umar Bindir |
The Director-General of the National Office for Technology Acquisition and Promotion (NOTAP), Engr. Umar Bindir, has commissioned the Intellectual Property and Technology Transfer Office at the National Institute for Pharmaceutical Research and Development (NIPRD) in Abuja. Speaking at the official commissioning ceremony, the DG said the aim of setting up the office is to encourage technology development by facilitating commercialization of research outputs.
He said: “our target for this programme is to ensure that all universities in Nigeria have an Intellectual Property and Technology Transfer Office (IPTTO) and that all research institutions have them with the intention of pushing our research outputs to mature into solution that can actually go ahead to create jobs and work for Nigerians.
“The projection here is that NIPRD is already on the run because they already have a lot of products in the market. They have a lot of science on the table, the transformation of these sciences into tangible intellectual property is in progress and we hope that many of the institutions with this kind of facility being implemented will follow suit.”
In his remark, the Director-General of NIPRD, Prof. Kariyus Gamaniel, decried the inability of the institute to successfully commercialise its research outputs.
He said: “I will say that this is one of the basic steps that this institution is taking towards commercialisation, which is taking products to the market. However with the coming of this office, which has been in process for a while now, the presence of this office will help us to establish and take further our research, innovation and discovery to the public through the products and processes based on knowledge generated from here. I am grateful to NOTAP and other collaborative agencies because as you can see it’s not a one man show, it’s not the institute alone that is involved. So with this collaboration I believe we’ll be able to make Nigeria productive in the sense that the economy can benefit from this research and development activities.”
