STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
The discovery of new drugs often takes place in wealthier countries, which means the drugs are often tailored to those countries' populations and not so much for the populations in what's often called the Global South. In South Africa, reporter Ari Daniel met a researcher who takes a different approach.
ARI DANIEL, BYLINE: Kelly Chibale grabs a chemistry book off the shelf in his office...
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DANIEL: ...And riffles through a parade of molecules, each one like an old friend.
KELLY CHIBALE: Calicheamicin, Taxol, brevetoxin-B, even. All of them are here.
DANIEL: Chibale's first taste of organic chemistry was in college in his home country of Zambia. Once he started visualizing molecules and how to transform one into another, he suddenly knew he'd found his passion.
CHBALE: It's a science, but it's also an art. And that's what really fascinates me about organic chemistry, and that's - I guess I fell in love. You know, when you fall in love, you don't really - can't explain.
DANIEL: Later, in labs in the U.K. and U.S., as a graduate student and researcher, Chibale was struck by the connection between chemistry and complex pharmaceuticals.
CHBALE: What is a drug? It's a molecule, and a molecule has a chemical structure.
DANIEL: A structure that, with effort, might just be built in the lab.
CHBALE: So when you see these Mount Everests of molecules that have been made, it's incredible. I mean, these things are just beautiful.
DANIEL: During his time abroad, Chibale also witnessed up close the powerful pipeline of drug discovery in the West.
CHBALE: I saw the pharmaceutical industry employing thousands and thousands of scientists working in research and development.
DANIEL: And tackling the health challenges relevant to those populations. Chibale knew that wasn't the case in Africa - a continent with many countries struggling with their own diseases, alongside limited funding, infrastructure and technical know-how. As Chibale was wrapping up his stint in California, he considered jobs in Western pharma companies. But then he came across a posting at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, and something stirred inside him.
CHBALE: I just felt this calling. It wasn't from my head. It was from my spirit. I felt it - to show that it's possible to do world-class research out of Africa.
DANIEL: He took the position and later founded the Holistic Drug Discovery and Development Centre in Cape Town, where he now serves as director. He says it's basically the only place in all of Africa with everything needed to find new drugs.
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CHBALE: All right.
DANIEL: Yeah.
CHBALE: Give you a lab coat...
DANIEL: Yeah. Sure.
CHBALE: ...Just to protect you.
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DANIEL: Chibale escorts me inside his lab. We pass benches and flasks, countless bottles of reagents...
CHBALE: This is a rotary evaporator.
DANIEL: ...And all manner of machine...
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DANIEL: ...That he and his team use in their pursuit of new medicines to combat malaria, tuberculosis and antimicrobial resistance.
CHBALE: Diseases that are very prevalent on my continent.
DANIEL: Here's the approach. The researchers take enormous numbers of molecules - sometimes tens of thousands - and, using robots that precisely dispense those compounds, look to see whether any can kill the pathogen in question or incapacitate one of its key enzymes.
CHBALE: We focus on those molecules that selectively kill the parasite and not harm normal mammalian cells.
DANIEL: And then his team tweaks the most promising molecules to see if they can make them even more potent until they have an ace in the hand. This was the approach they took that, a little more than a decade ago, surfaced a promising new kind of malaria drug.
CHBALE: It was the first time that an African-led international effort took a project from the lab and discovered a drug that entered human clinical trials for any disease.
DANIEL: Safety concerns arose in rat studies, which ultimately halted further testing. And this, says Chibale, is the nature of drug discovery.
CHBALE: It doesn't mean that there aren't surprises or miracles. They do happen, you know? But you have to kiss many frogs before you meet the prince.
DANIEL: Chibale is searching for this prince in Africa to improve the health of Africans and stanch the bleeding of local talent overseas.
CHBALE: If we can attract the talent to develop it, to nurture it, we can keep the talent here.
DANIEL: The center currently employs more than 75 people. Mathew Njoroge is one of the scientists here.
MATHEW NJOROGE: It gives us all a lot of optimism about what the future of drug discovery in Africa might look like.
DANIEL: Njoroge is originally from Kenya.
NJOROGE: I collect data, finding out how drugs are absorbed and excreted.
DANIEL: This is key information because if a drug's developed and tested in one group, it may not work in another population or could even be dangerous. That's especially true in Africa, the most genetically diverse continent. Mwila Mulubwa is also a scientist at the center who grew up in Zambia.
MWILA MULUBWA: We don't treat Africa as a homogeneous population, like the way it is with Caucasians. There are a lot of distinct subpopulations who can metabolize a drug differently.
DANIEL: The correct dose of a drug tends to be determined using livers from the patient population.
MULUBWA: The liver actually is the organ that breaks down most of the drugs.
DANIEL: In a country like the U.S., organ donation provides enough livers to test drugs on before they go to human trial. But such a practice is largely seen as taboo across Africa, says Mathew Njoroge.
NJOROGE: There is that culture around the integrity of the body, so we might not feel comfortable donating organs.
DANIEL: So the team in Cape Town is working with a small number of liver samples that have already been collected while also running computer models to simulate the metabolism of African populations and predict an optimized dose. It's just one part of the elaborate process required to develop a drug and bring it to the people who need it, says Kelly Chibale.
CHBALE: It's not just going from the lab to the patient, but it's also vice versa - from the patient back into the lab.
DANIEL: When Chibale was a child, he was one of those patients, battling a particularly serious malaria infection. He recalls being wheeled into the hospital in Zambia, hearing of other children dying quickly from the same disease. The doctors gave Chibale the medications he needed to survive.
CHBALE: And I took it for granted. Only much later in life did I realize two things. No. 1 - someone somewhere in the world invested to discover and develop that medicine. The second thing was the fact that someone somewhere, another human being I don't even know, volunteered to participate in a clinical trial for my benefit.
DANIEL: Chibale ended up making a full recovery, and now he is that someone - committed to discovering new medicines to heal his neighbors.
For NPR News, I'm Ari Daniel, Cape Town, South Africa.
INSKEEP: Reporting for this story was supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center.
(SOUNDBITE OF SAMBA TOURE'S "WHITE CROCODILE BLUES (A SONG FOR M) (INSTRUMENTAL)") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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