Drug Discovery and Development Research Unit
Current and existing projects
The current core effort of the Unit is to build a library of natural products in order to provide a chemical resource for various screening platforms for African natural products that is inexpensive to operate and easy to transfer between research centres. This will facilitate the use of emerging druggable molecular targets of infectious diseases and to accelerate the development of sustainable infrastructure for natural product based pharmacological discovery in Africa.
The development of the library involves the creation and expansion of a virtual database of African natural product chemical structures reported in literature from the past by African researchers. An actual repository of these compounds will be built containing these collectable compounds, and expanded on using classical phytochemistry, novel Screens-To-Nature technologies, semi-synthetic modifications and biotransformations. The chemical entities deposited in the chemical library will undergo virtual screening in silico using various computational tools as well as in vitro screening against pathogen molecular target assays in order to enrich the library.
This multi-disciplinary approach by the Drug discovery and development Unit encompasses various fields of science, including synthetic chemistry, computational modelling, and pharmacology by various well acclaimed African and international experts from both industry and academia.
|
