Since her childhood, Sabine Adeline Fanta Yadang dreamed of becoming a doctor to “treat the population”. But, when she fails the entrance exam to medical school after her scientific baccalaureate, she is forced to review her plans. She then chose biology, and enrolled at the University of Ngaoundéré, in Adamaoua, one of the three regions of northern Cameroon. More than a decade later, the young woman can pride herself on “caring”, in her own way.
At 32, she received in her office at the Institute of Medical Research and Medicinal Plant Studies in Yaoundé, the capital, where she conducted research in neuropharmacology, a branch of science that studies the effects of drugs on the the nervous system. A career she fought for. “In Cameroon, the climate in higher education is very difficult,” she confides. From the moment I arrived at university, it was difficult. We are quickly harassed. You have to use malice to dismiss a teacher without humiliating him. We feel very alone, because the girls don’t talk much to each other. » In the country, 80% of higher education teachers are men, according to authorities figures.
But Sabine Adeline Fanta Yadang found her way. “I’m fascinated by the brain,” she says, explaining that she is “determined” to find “solutions to boost memory.” She became passionate about this specialty when she attended her very first course on the central nervous system. Immediately, she thinks of her grandfather’s multiple memory losses. While half of those over 55 are affected by neurological disorders in Cameroon, according to a study published in the journal IBRO Neuroscience Reports in 2021, residents of the village of Sabine Adeline Fanta Yadang, located in the Far North, had the habit of attributing the errors of “elders” to witchcraft; she thinks that these memory lapses are more likely linked to a neurodegenerative disease such as Alzheimer’s. For her research project, she decided to “find and provide solutions” to memory loss: “In Africa, we most of the time treat ourselves with medicinal plants. I thought, “Why not try to find an herbal remedy that can correct memory loss?” »
Experiments on rats
The neuropharmacologist in training turns to traditional practitioners and carries out multiple tests with their concoctions. This single mother meets around fifty of these traditional healers, identifies around a hundred plants and eliminates those that have already been the subject of scientific studies. In the end, only Carissa edulis, a thorny shrub native to tropical Africa, remains in the running as a possible medicine. Some traditional practitioners boil its leaves and sell the filtrate to their patients.
In the laboratory of the University of Ngaoundéré, she carries out experiments on rats and mice, into which she injects extracts of the plant. The object recognition tests to which she subjected them were encouraging and “prove, according to the researcher, that the plant has properties on the brain.” She takes her research further by injecting rats with chemicals so that “they completely lose their memory” and then administers different concentrations of Carissa extracts to them. “In 80% of cases, there were positive results,” rejoices Sabine Adeline Fanta Yadang.
The pharmacologist hopes that her research will appear in scientific publications in order to “benefit as many people as possible”. Winner of a scholarship from the L’Oréal Foundation, the Cameroonian will be able to continue her postdoctoral research at the University of Ibadan, in Nigeria, thanks to the endowment associated with the prize. His ambition is to carry out in-depth studies on this plant to determine if it can be associated with a treatment against Alzheimer’s disease.