Research and Academic Mobility for Drug Discovery in Africa (RAMDDA)

ongoing

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 12.9 million people are diagnosed with cancer; 114,000 of whom are children and adolescents. Drug resistance, unreported instances and misdiagnoses, as well as intolerable side effects associated with using the current market treatments motivate patients to evade the prescriptions, thereby contributing to the annual increase in total cancer cases. Since the toxic side effects of the current anticancer medications have been shown to be a significant issue in non-radiation cancer therapy, the pharmaceutical industry is actively looking for new medications that can both effectively combat cancer cells and improve patient comfort. Besides these, one of the most typical consequences for cancer patients is bacterial infection. Chemotherapy and radiation therapy kill cancer cells, but they also destroy immune system cells that help us fight off infections. This indicates that the patients experience frequent infections that call for antibiotic treatment. Moreover, due to the rise of bacteria that are multidrug resistant to even the strongest medications, it is becoming more and more challenging to treat infectious diseases with the current commercial antibiotics. As a result, extensive drug discovery studies are being conducted to create new therapeutic strategies and efficient medications with a broad spectrum of antimicrobial activities directed at different biological targets. Currently, it is a well-known fact that the number of effective antibiotics available to treat infectious diseases is diminishing. If appropriate actions are not taken, decades of progress in health and medicine risk being reversed. Hence, the project ‘Research and Academic Mobility for Drug Discovery in Africa (RAMDDA)’ aims at strengthening inter-institutional and intra-institutional knowledge and skills transfer among the partner African HEIs to nurture, design and develop new and novel antimicrobial and anticancer drug molecules of both natural and synthetic origin. It will train a total of 40 MSc and PhD students in the fields of Physical Chemistry, Inorganic Chemistry, Organic Chemistry and Materials Chemistry, as well as re-skilling/up-skilling of 12 trainees and 8 staff members of the project partner HEIs and other African HEIs to deliver the workforce necessary for the design and development of new and novel drug molecules for antimicrobial and cancer treatments. The project will also increase HEIs' ability and open the door for tackling cancer and antimicrobial therapies, two of Africa's biggest health concerns of the twenty-first century.