Professor Dame Ijeoma Uchegbu

The luxury

A variety of seeds (yam, corn, rice)

A variety of seeds so that I can grow some food. ... if you can give me some yam seeds, some corn seeds, some rice seeds, with a little bit of a how-to, then I can probably catch some fish.

You were born in Hackney, East London, in 1960. Your parents, Jane and Gilbert, had come to the UK from Nigeria shortly before you were born. And am I right in thinking that your name has an auspicious connection to their journey?

It absolutely does. So my mother arrived. She's 19 years old. She's pregnant with me when they came over. My dad, 30 years old. And they've come to study. And my dad has almost liquidated all his assets. So for him, this was a big move. And he bought a house in Hackney. They had tenants to pay their way. Then he decided to call me Ijoma, which means have a good trip. So he was hopeful. He really hoped it was going to be fine.

When you were a baby, your parents placed you with foster parents, a white family. Do you remember them looking after you when you were little?

I really do remember being in the family and being with my auntie Pat is what I called her and her older children. And it was just a lovely time with this family. And I've often said that the only way I knew I was different was I was looking at their palms and thinking they should be brown because my palms are white and the soles of their feet should also be brown. But I noticed that it wasn't like that.

You were thirteen when you made the move [to Nigeria]. Obviously you'd been brought up with an expectation that it was going to happen at some point. How did you feel about moving?

The good thing about that was suddenly we had new clothes. So that was all I was thinking about. I wasn't thinking too much about leaving my friends. But then towards the end, I remember my form teacher said, Go and tell the head teacher that you're leaving, that this is your last week. And I'd have been this bravado. I'm going to Nigeria. I'm going to leave you all. I'm going to be in the sun. I went to see the head teacher and I just fell apart. I remember being in her office sobbing. And I remember her telling me, At least you'll have Christmas in the sun. As if that was something that was comforting, I then became absolutely bereft that I would never see this place again. So that was really, really tough. And then when I got to Nigeria, it was even tougher because I then had a skin condition that sort of confined me to my bedroom. So this wasn't, it was kind of analogy to [the] sun … People would come, you know, I'm in this dark room, they'd have a look and it's from their expression that you realize actually you're not looking that great because of the way they looked at you.

So Ijoma, you have your own pharmaceutical company with your husband, and you say you're trying to apply your science to real world problems. Now part of your work focuses on making medicines to treat diseases that lead to blindness. What are the difficulties and what are you working on in that area?

So the one that we went into clinical trials with, and that's the first time the company had done a clinical test, is really looking at a form of allergic eye disease, but very, a very severe form. So people that have this form of allergic eye disease, they have nodules inside their eye and the whole eye is inflamed. So you can imagine on the inside of your eyelid, you actually have hives, that kind of thing. And to treat these diseases is very difficult. They can either take steroid drops, but if you take steroid drops for too long, you have side effects, you have very high intraocular pressure, something called glaucoma, or you have a cataract forming. So you can't take steroids for too long. Or they can take drugs by mouth that suppress the immune system, but then they suppress everywhere. So then what we've taken into the clinic is something that we can use, which will only suppress the immune system around the eye. It doesn't get into the blood, so it increases the safety. … The second area that we're interested in is that we can give eye drops where the actual drug compound goes to the back of the eye, the retina. And that's important because patients at the moment, they have to get an injection into the eyeball. But that injection into the eyeball comes with all sorts of side effects. You can't put an injection into the eyeball every day and all the time and for years and years.