Professor Kelly Chibale oversees projects devoted to novel therapies for HIV, TB, malaria, cardiovascular disease and hypertension in South Africa.

As UCT Chair of Drug Discovery, Chibale oversees projects devoted to novel therapies for HIV, TB, malaria, cardiovascular disease and hypertension at one of the few centres of medicinal chemistry on the continent. Africa lacks capacity in many areas of research, but there may be no shortage as striking as its dearth of drug discovery. For South Africa, filling that gap is priority number one, and Chibale is leading the way.

“There are basically three broad areas of malaria that I’m working on,” he says. “One is a hit-to-lead programme in collaboration with the Medicines for Malaria Venture (MMV). It’s quite a big programme. Basically, MMV paid for high-throughput screening (HTS) of a 35,000 compound library, and we’re working with around 200 hits from that screening.”

A native of Zambia, Chibale arrived in South Africa in 1996 after a two-year fellowship at the Scripps Institute, San Diego, USA. At the time, he says, the research paradigm was to isolate compounds from a plant, determine the chemical structure, and, if it was new, publish the results. “There was no regard for the intellectual property,” he says. “Nothing was patented.”

Over the past decade, Chibale has worked to change that culture, mainly through collaborations with pharmaceutical firms, non-profit groups and international organizations. In 2007, his UCT lab was selected as a “centre of excellence” by WHO/TDR, becoming a member of TDR’s Medicinal Chemistry and Pharmacokinetics Network. The network, one of four devoted to different parts of the drug discovery chain, links African institutions like UCT with industry partners, providing Chibale and his two-dozen postdocs access to tools such as high-throughput screening (HTS) not found in South Africa.

Chibale keeps a quote close at hand, something a pastor said years back: “Three percent of the population makes things happen. Five percent watches things happen. And the rest wonder what happened.”

“I love that line because it really speaks to self-empowerment,” he says. “We have to ask ourselves ‘What are we doing to change our situation?’ It’s not enough to just blame politicians. We have to take the lead in solving our own problems, and there have to be real success stories to inspire that.”

Read more: Good chemistry: a South African rising star, on Tropika

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