As a child of Nigerian immigrants, Stephanie Ibemere, Ph.D., has long had a desire to give back to her ancestral home. But it wasn’t until her doctoral studies at the University of Cincinnati, when she heard a guest speaker mention Nigeria’s struggles treating sickle cell disease (SCD), that she began to envision how.
Sickle cell disease is a blood disorder in which red blood cells fold into sickle shapes, causing chronic anemia, severe pain and organ damage. Because possessing one copy of a sickle cell allele offers some protection against malaria, it is more prevalent in places where malaria is endemic. Nigeria has the most sickle cell cases of any country in the world, with about 150,000 babies born each year with the disease. Due to wide gaps in access to diagnosis and treatment, more than half of Nigerian children with the disease die before age five.