It is on the path of a thwarted journey that Adnane Remmal may have made a major medical discovery. This Moroccan biology professor has just received the 2017 public inventor prize awarded by the European Patent Observatory.
Thanks to essential oils, says BFMTV journalist Nina Godart, he managed to “boost” antibiotics that had become ineffective due to bacterial resistance. A major scourge that threatens the planet, repeats the WHO tirelessly.
A young researcher in Paris in the 90s, Adnane Remmal specializes in arterial hypertension. French research laboratories offered him a job and a future. He declines. It is in the country that he wants to exercise. But in Morocco, his specialty is not one of the priorities.
Chance will lead him to the operating theatres. There, the surgeons talk to him about their patients operated on successfully, but who die for lack of a therapeutic arsenal against nosocomial infections.
No more hypertension, the researcher goes to biology. With one idea in mind: essential oils. In Morocco, they are the basis of care. With a chemist, Adnane Remmal goes on the trail of the active ingredient and focuses on how it works. “An antibiotic, he explains, works like a key that opens a lock. If the bacteria mutates, the lock has changed, the key is no longer useful. »
By doping the antibiotic with essential oils, continues the journalist, “Remmal has invented a key which does not just open the door, but which demolishes it”.
After ten years of research, clinical trials have been launched and, if they are conclusive, a drug should see the light of day next year. The man who has become a leader in his country has declined offers from big pharma, which coveted his patent. The drug will remain 100% Moroccan and it is the students that Adnane Remmal trains every day at the University of Fez who will tell the rest of this story.
