ICGEB Alumnus Feleke Mekonnen Demeke from Ethiopia shares his experience as an ICGEB BIOTECHNET fellow and Ethiopian CRP grant team researcher.
As a BIOTECHNET fellow in the Molecular Virology Lab at ICGEB Trieste, Feleke Mekonnen works with Dr. Alessandro Marcello on arbovirus surveillance in Ethiopia’s Afar and Amhara regions. Fuelled by more than a thousand sera samples shipped between Ethiopia and Trieste, the project aims to identify circulating serotypes and genotypes of different arboviruses.
Born in the small town of Mankussa in the Amhara region of Ethiopia, Feleke Mekonnen and his family live in Bahir dar, which he defines “the most beautiful city in Ethiopia” – with a cultural heritage including 13th-century monasteries in Lake Tana and Tis-Istat Falls in the Blue Nile River. Affiliated with Ethiopia’s Bahir Dar University, he is a medical microbiologist with experience in clinical diagnosis of viral, bacterial, and parasitic infectious diseases in several public health institutes. With a group of colleagues, he helped to establish the Tibebe Ghion COVID diagnostic center to provide clinical diagnostics throughout the pandemic.
“My first contact with ICGEB had been through an ICGEB CRP Grant for a project on climate change and transmission dynamics of Dengue epidemiology,” he recounts, adding: “The team sequenced the full Dengue genome for the first time in Ethiopia using the Oxford Nanopore technology, paving the way for Ethiopian public health institutes to utilise the technology for emerging and re-emerging infectious disease outbreaks across Sub-Saharan Africa.” The genome sequence of Dengue 3 was subsequently deposited in the NCBI database.
Collaborating with Dr. Marcello and the Molecular Virology Lab has been the most impactful experience of my academic and research life. I believe the group has made very significant contributions, such as developing the saliva RT-LAMP assay for SARS-CoV-2 diagnosis and being the first to sequence Ethiopian COVID-19, providing crucial insights into the circulation of SARS-CoV-2 variants in Ethiopia.
The CRP project is also developing RT-LAMP technology for the diagnosis of flaviviruses, particularly Zika, which is expected to reap significant benefits for Africa in terms of diagnostics, given the technology’s affordability, accessibility, and the fact that it does not require sophisticated equipment or special training of personnel.
“My research can benefit district hospitals like Quara Primary Hospital in the West Gondar Zone of the Amhara region. This hospital faces significant challenges in diagnosing infectious diseases like Malaria, Dengue, and Zika, due to the lack of affordable, accessible, and low-skill techniques like RT-LAMP. I work on the surveillance and diagnosis of arboviruses to alleviate diagnostic challenges in these hospitals and similar facilities across Ethiopia” – shares Feleke Mekonnen.
Through ICGEB, Feleke Mekonnen has honed skills in ELISA, RT-PCR sequencing, conventional PCR techniques, sequence, mutation and bioinformatic analysis, and virus culturing techniques – all crucial to work ongoing in Ethiopia. He is first author in the CRP-related preprint article, and his research will continue to focus on optimising affordable, accessible, and rapid modalities, like RT-LAMP, to solve diagnostic challenges in community labs in Ethiopia and beyond.
