Nearly two decades ago, South African researcher Kelly Chibale recalls participating in a pioneering World Health Organization (WHO) meeting in Abuja, Nigeria, organized by TDR, the WHO-hosted Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases, focusing on the concept of an African drug discovery network.
For Chibale, the main outcome of that encounter was a bad case of food poisoning. But the researcher, who went on to found the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) Holistic Drug Discovery and Development Centre (H3D) a few years later, never forgot the idea.
Twenty years later, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic fallout over the lack of research and development (R&D) and manufacturing on the continent, an African R&D network has finally come of age.
A network of African research institutions engaged in drug discovery research is taking full form. Earlier this year, some 21 research institutions spread across seven countries came together as the Grand Challenges African Drug Discovery Accelerator (GC-ADDA) co-sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) and LifeArc, a UK-based self-funded medical research charity.
The network was conceived in a 2017 conversation Chibale had with Peter Warner, BMGF Senior Program Officer, and Tim Wells, Chief Scientific Officer at Medicine for Malaria Venture (MMV), and the concept was championed by Warner within the foundation, Chibale recalls.
It was incubated between 2019 and 2023 against the backdrop of the COVID pandemic, with a series of Grand Challenges mini-grants disbursed to different African institutions that worked individually on key R&D challenges in malaria and TB drug discovery, among other issues.
Then, in January 2024, the GC-ADDA network came into its own with the $7.2 million grant from the BMGF and LifeArc.
Last month, LifeArc awarded another $6.3 million to H3D to establish a Center for Translational AMR Research (CTAR) at its UCT base.
The new CTAR project aims to identify and develop new precision antibiotics to combat several multidrug-resistant (MDR) Gram-negative bacteria, including Acinetobacter baumannii, which typically infects people with weakened immune systems, including in hospitals, and is a leading driver of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) on the continent.
Chibale, whose H3D Foundation will spearhead GC-ADDA, was in Geneva recently to discuss and promote the GC-ADDA network among African Ambassadors to the UN in Geneva Missions .
He sat down before that meeting to talk with Health Policy Watch about his vision and its development.
Flagship projects
“I can give credit to my colleague Solomon Nwaka of WHO/TDR for initiating the idea [of a network]. It was visionary. But the difference now is that this is a model that is based around specific, concrete innovation projects in research institutions on the continent,” said Chibale, whose H3D in Cape Town offers one such example.
Based on lessons learnt in the two previous rounds of Grand Challenges Grants, the new GC-ADDA network will focus on four flagship projects. These will be led by research centers in Ghana, Cameroon, South Africa and Zimbabwe, but also involving the other African institutions, including those that were recipients of earlier grant rounds and will be integral parts of the developing network.