Author: Sidney Ocanagil-Tunstall

On a rainy day in February 2025, Pathology News received an email from a Dr. Ejike, based in Nigeria requesting our support to find his lab a microtome.

We met for an interview over temperamental connection. Dr. Ejike, a histopathologist working in the back and beyond of rural Nigeria shared his story with me. After becoming a Fellow of the Medical College of Pathologists (FMCPath) in 2022, Dr. Ejike wasted no time in making an impact, setting up his own clinic, ProPath, a specialist laboratory and medical centre. He leads a small but dedicated team, with two consultants assisting him as they work to provide essential pathology services and more to the local population.

For the thousands of villagers in this locality, Dr. Ejike’s clinic is the only centre available for vital healthcare. All resections and biopsies were first handled by Dr. Ejike and his technicians before being sent in cassettes to the nearest city, Abakaliki.

This was an obvious bottleneck in their diagnostic workflow, leaving patients and Dr. Ejike’s team waiting for weeks on the return of their samples. At the centre of the delay was a single missing instrument: a microtome. Unable to process tissue in-house, samples were sent out by courier, with patients picking up the cost.

The result: not just a significant delay in diagnosis. The real heartbreak was the inflated expenses for the residents that made essential testing  unaffordable. Around 180 of Dr.

Ejike’s patients each year never received a definitive diagnosis because of this, leaving treatable conditions undetected.

In light of the situation, the Pathology News team leveraged its network to find a spare microtome that could be sent to rural Nigeria and support Dr. Ejike’s lab. After months of dead ends, the light at the end of the tunnel shone brightest when the team met Hicham El Attar, Founder and Co-founder of several histopathology start-ups including the African Society of Digital Pathology (AFSDP).

Thanks to Dr. El Attar’s generous support, Dr. Ejike now has a microtome in his lab enabling him to provide a much higher level of care for his patients.

More about Dr. Ejike

Dr. O.S. Ejike is a histopathologist specializing in surgical pathology, intraoperative consultations, post-mortem examinations, and interventional cytopathology. Beyond running a clinic in his local area, he also lectures in histopathology at Alex Ekwueme Federal University Ndufu-Alike, Ikwo, focusing on tropical histopathology.

Beyond academia, he leads monthly community classes on vaccination and contraception, emphasizing public health education. Having published multiple peer-reviewed papers his research spans breast carcinoma profiling, antibiotic resistance, and antibacterial properties of citrus extracts.