U.S. Govt Awards 2nd Patent to Dr. Dougbeh Chris Nyan for Invention of Rapid Pathogen Diagnostic Test

By Democracy Watch News Desk

WASHINGTON, DC, May 2, 2022 – In the USA, one of Africa’s renowned infectious disease scientists, Dr. Dougbeh Christopher Nyan of Liberia has been granted a second patent by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) for his invention of another rapid diagnostic test that detects multiple infections record time.

The United States Patent No. 11,306,367 was recently issued to Dr. Nyan for his scientific invention entitled, “Methods for Rapid Detection and Identification of Viral Nucleic Acids” of infectious pathogens following nearly seven years of review by the USPTO.

This patent forms part of the diagnostic intellectual property portfolio of Shufflex Biomed’s Rapid Multiplex Real-Time Isothermal Amplification Method. It embodies cutting-edge methods and procedures that specifically target the detection and simultaneous identification of multiple viral infections in less than an hour using one test. This new invention is viral-specific but applicable to other pathogens in detecting both viral RNA and DNA.

Dr. Nyan, who is Chief Medical and Scientific Officer of Shufflex Biomed stated that “this new patent is a milestone achievement of our hard work and innovation in diagnostics. It adds to our arsenal of tools in detecting infectious diseases in the world, and my team and I are very happy about it.”

The issuance of this patent demonstrates the ingenuity, years of perseverance, and tremendous hard work of Dr. Nyan in preserving the intellectual property rights for this novel procedure and its commercial exclusivity.

The NIH-trained infectious disease scientist, Dr. Nyan is globally acclaimed for inventing the ground-breaking Rapid Multiplex Real-Time Isothermal Amplification Method for detecting multiple infections and identifying them simultaneously with one test.

The US Patent and Trademark Office awarded Dr. Nyan his first patent on September 11, 2018, for his ground-breaking invention which targets such pathogens as the Coronaviruses (COVID-19), HIV, Ebola, Malaria, Dengue, the Hepatitis virus, and many more.

Dr. Nyan was a former pre-med student (studying Zoology and Chemistry) at the University of Liberia while advocating for democracy as a student leader in the 1980s. He was expelled from school for his pro-democracy activism, arrested, and imprisoned by the military government of General Samuel Doe. He fled the country into exile after his release from prison.

Exiled in Europe, young Dougbeh continued his studies and earned his medical degree from the famous Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, the Medical Faculty of the Humboldt-University of Berlin in Germany. He was later trained as an infectious disease scientist at the National Institutes of Health and the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in the United States.

Dr. Nyan later worked as a scientist at the Naval Medical Research Center and the US Food and Drug Administration where senior authorities conspired to deny him his intellectual property rights and unlawfully terminated his research positions in 2009 and 2014, respectively. But Dr. Nyan, representing himself (pro se), filed legal and administrative actions against authorities at the agencies with the courts and the United States House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology then Chaired by former Texas Representative Lamar S. Smith. Around 2015, Dr. Nyan ultimately emerged victoriously and won back his full intellectual property rights.

During the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, Dr. Nyan, then a scientist at the US Food and Drug Administration and Head of the Diaspora Ebola Taskforce, testified before the US Congress and provided a roadmap that contributed to ending the outbreak. He advocated for establishing the African Center for Disease Control now in Ethiopia and creating the National Public Health Institute of Liberia and other countries in the region.

In the fight against the present pandemic, Dr. Nyan has conducted numerous COVID-19 pandemic public health and vaccination awareness and diagnostic activities, in the US, Liberia, and other African countries as head of the Diaspora COVID-19 Focus Group and member of the Medical Respond Corps of the State of Maryland in the US.

His scientific works have been published in reputable peer-reviewed scientific journals such as Nature, the International Journal of Infectious Disease, Clinical Infectious Disease, and Neuropeptides, and archived at the National Library of Medicine at the NIH.

According to senior investment analysts, this second patent potentially increases the pre-money value of the start-up to a multimillion-dollar company as the Shufflex diagnostic kits are at the pre-production stage.

“I am very thankful to the governments of the US and Germany for my medical education, scientific training, and urge African governments to create an enabling environment that will utilize and promote science and technology on the continent,” Dr. Nyan emphasized.