Year-End Reflection (2025): Biosecurity Ideas I Was Unable to Execute—and Why They Still Matter

By Nnaemeka Emmanuel Nnadi @ 2025-12-30T00:56 (+10)

TL;DR

In 2025, I worked at the margins of biosecurity research in Nigeria. I did not meaningfully shift global risk trajectories—but I identified several pathogen-agnostic surveillance and prevention ideas that I believe remain unusually high-leverage in low-infrastructure settings. All three stalled primarily due to funding constraints rather than scientific infeasibility. I share them here to invite critique, collaboration, or replication

 

Context

I am a microbiologist based in Nigeria, working primarily on microbial genomics and bacteriophages. My comparative advantage lies less in access to capital-intensive infrastructure and more in proximity to under-surveilled pathogen ecosystems.

As the year ends, I feel I underperformed relative to what could have been done in biosecurity—not for lack of ideas, but for lack of execution capacity. Below are three concrete projects I hoped to initiate in 2025, each of which I believe would have generated disproportionate informational or preventive value.

 

1. Nasal-Swab Sentinel Surveillance as an Alternative to Wastewater

The idea

I planned a pathogen-agnostic respiratory surveillance system based on pooled nasal swabs and indoor air sampling, designed as a complement—or, in some contexts, a substitute—for wastewater metagenomic surveillance.

The proposed study would have assessed indoor air and pooled swab sampling for viral pathogen detection in Jos, Plateau State, Nigeria.

Why this mattered

Wastewater surveillance has become a gold standard in high-income settings, but it assumes:

In many low- and middle-income cities, these assumptions fail.

By contrast:

Most importantly, the approach is pathogen-agnostic: sequencing does not presuppose influenza, SARS-like viruses, or any predefined threat. It simply asks what is circulating and how it changes over time.

Why it stalled

The project did not stall due to lack of technical feasibility or institutional interest. I secured conceptual buy-in from SecureBio, with the understanding that the study would proceed contingent on execution funding.

The work was structured as a small, clearly bounded pilot, requiring upfront support for pooled sampling, sequencing, ethics approvals, and minimal personnel time. 

Without committed funding, there was no viable pathway to move from design to deployment, despite a defined protocol and an identified implementation partner. The bottleneck was therefore purely financial rather than scientific, regulatory, or collaborative.

Importantly, the project remains shovel-ready: the study design is specified, surveillance sites are identifiable, and the core question—whether pooled nasal swabs and indoor air sampling can complement or outperform wastewater surveillance in low-infrastructure settings—remains unanswered and decision-relevant.

 

 

2. A Phage-Based Vaccine Platform

The idea

A phage-display–based vaccine platform, using bacteriophages as modular, low-cost antigen carriers.

This was not intended as a near-term pandemic vaccine solution, but as an exploration of:

Why this mattered for biosecurity

Most global vaccine platforms assume:

These assumptions break precisely in the regions where outbreak detection is slowest and response capacity weakest.

A phage-based platform, even if only partially successful, could:

Why it stalled

 

3. Pathogen-Agnostic Fungal Surveillance via Airborne Spore Traps

The idea

A third project I hoped to initiate was a pathogen-agnostic early-warning system for fungal threats, built around airborne spore trapping, metagenomics, and machine-learning–assisted classification, producing real-time fungal risk maps.

The premise is straightforward: many fungal pathogens of concern to humans, animals, and crops spread via airborne spores in the 1–10 μm range, which can reach the deep lung when inhaled. Yet fungi remain largely absent from mainstream biosecurity surveillance.

Why fungi are a biosecurity blind spot

Fungi have several properties that make them particularly concerning:

Historically, fungi have reshaped human and ecological history, yet they receive far less attention than viral or bacterial threats.

What the system would have done

The system would combine:

Rather than targeting predefined pathogens, it would establish baseline spore distributions and flag anomalous growth or dispersal dynamics, analogous to wastewater metagenomics but for airborne fungi.

Why it did not happen

What I’m Uncertain About

I am genuinely unsure and welcome correction.

 

Closing Reflection

All three projects share a common theme: they challenge assumptions embedded in current biosecurity practice—about infrastructure, pathogens, and geography.

My main regret in 2025 is not failure, but non-execution of ideas that might have refined or falsified those assumptions.

If biosecurity is truly a global public good, then work that is:

should not fail quietly due to modest funding gaps.

I hope to do better next year. I also hope these ideas find life—whether through me or through others.

Comments, critiques, or pointers to aligned funding mechanisms are very welcome

Mihkel Viires 🔹 @ 2025-12-30T02:07 (+1)

Honestly, I think you did a great job and tried your best. But your environment did not provide the support you needed.

I understand that the Nigerian government doesn't provide much funding for universities and scientific research work. One plausible reason for this (apart from corruption, theft, waste, etc) is that the Nigerian government collects a very low percentage of its GDP as taxes, less than 14 percent[1]. For comparison, the OECD average is 34 percent[2]. If the government is able to increase tax collection and enforcement, this should hopefully increase the budget and free up more money to fund research. Getting to the OECD level could take decades, but Nigeria is at least making some progress, the tax collection rate has increased in recent years, which is a good sign (even though increased taxes probably are not fun to pay, no matter one's country!).

  1. https://www.thecable.ng/tinubu-tax-to-gdp-ratio-has-increased-to-13-5-debt-service-to-revenue-ratio-down-to-50/#google_vignette ↩︎

  2. https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/revenue-statistics-2025_3a264267-en.html ↩︎

Nnaemeka Emmanuel Nnadi @ 2025-12-30T16:11 (+2)

Thank you for this thoughtful and fair assessment. I appreciate the generosity of your reading and, more importantly, the structural lens you bring to the issue. I agree that many of the constraints were environmental rather than individual, and that limited institutional support shapes what is realistically achievable 

While low tax collection clearly constrains Nigeria’s fiscal capacity, I would argue that corruption is a more decisive bottleneck—both analytically and practically—than the tax-to-GDP ratio itself.

First, corruption weakens tax collection in the first place. Leakage, informal exemptions, weak enforcement, and negotiated compliance mean that even existing tax laws are not fully realized in revenue. In this sense, corruption is upstream of the tax problem: improving integrity and enforcement would likely raise effective tax collection without changing nominal tax rates. Many countries with comparable income levels collect more taxes not because their citizens are taxed more aggressively, but because compliance is higher and leakages are lower.

Second, corruption distorts how whatever revenue is collected gets allocated and spent. Even under current fiscal constraints, the marginal naira lost to misappropriation, inflated contracts, or politically motivated spending directly crowds out funding for universities, laboratories, and research grants. This is crucial: the issue is not only that the budget is small, but that within that small budget, research and higher education are systematically deprioritized or underfunded due to rent-seeking incentives that favor short-term, visible projects over long-term capacity building.