Prof Kelly Chibale is up for a grand challenge

When the Gates Foundation asked Prof Kelly Chibale to host a malaria drug accelerator consortium meeting in Cape Town, Africa’s most prominent researcher on drug discovery offered an alternative.

“There’s no malaria in Cape Town,” Chibale told the foundation. “Let’s go where the malaria is. Let’s go to Zambia.” He describes the meeting he arranged in Livingstone in early May 2025 as “a joint session, where we scientists can see what the communities need, and the communities can see what we scientists need. So we can learn from each other.”

Chibale’s opinion carries weight around the world. In April 2025 he was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences. This followed his election, in October 2024, as one of 10 international members to the US National Academy of Medicine, the highest honour in medicine and health in the US.

Both academies cited Chibale’s work in pioneering infectious disease drug discovery in Africa and leading international project teams, including one that discovered the first small molecule clinical candidate for any disease, researched on African soil by an African-led international team. His long-term goal is to develop an African research and development pharmaceutical sector and improve access to medicines by building technological capacity and local skills to make them cheaply.

The delegates at the Livingstone meeting included Neville Isdell, former chair and CEO of The Coca-Cola Co, and Chris Flowers, CEO of US private investment company JC Flowers & Co. They co-founded the Isdell:Flowers Cross-Border Malaria Initiative, which seeks to eliminate malaria in Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Chibale is the Neville Isdell chair in African-centric drug discovery & development, and founding director of the Holistic Drug Discovery & Development (H3D) Centre at the University of Cape Town (UCT). Isdell has funded the chair since 2019, with donations totalling $2.74m, to help fund research “tailoring drugs for the genetically diverse African population”, Chibale says.

The relationship between the professor and the business leader goes beyond their shared interest in malaria. Chibale was born and raised in Zambia; Isdell moved there with his family when he was eight, and later joined the Coca-Cola Bottling Co there. Isdell studied at UCT in the 1960s and stayed in Smuts Hall, the men’s residence recently renamed Upper Campus Residence, where Chibale is the warden.

Yet there are differences. Chibale never knew his father, who died when he was two months old. He and his elder brother grew up without electricity or running water. Their mother worked as a hospital cleaner. To study at night, Chibale used a glass jar and paraffin as a lamp. The single room the family lived in was so cramped that when he turned a page in his book, the tiny flame died.

Zambia’s free higher education policy enabled him to graduate with a chemistry degree from the University of Zambia in 1987. Later he was selected as a Cambridge Livingstone Trust scholar. Early in the programme, he was in tears, ready to give up, after failing, over and over again, to reproduce a recipe from Harvard University for creating a specific molecule in crystalline form. Instead, the end product was a liquid.

“But I had an amazing supervisor, the late Stuart Warren,” Chibale says. “He’d never taken on a student from Africa before.” Warren explained that the Harvard recipe was simply responding differently in the UK climate. Chibale had been doing it right all along. The experience taught Chibale an important lesson. “You can fail your way to success,” he says.

He joined UCT in 1996. He established H3D in 2010 as the first (and so far the only) African centre working in drug discovery and development. Funding came out of the strategic partnerships he built with pharmaceutical companies, among them Novartis, Merck and Johnson & Johnson; nonprofit groups such as the Gates Foundation, Medicines for Malaria Venture and LifeArc; and the South African government.

In 2023, the Gates Foundation and LifeArc partnered with the H3D Foundation for $7.2m to start a new programme called Grand Challenges African Drug Discovery Accelerator. It comprises five flagship drug discovery projects conducted by teams from 32 institutions in eight African countries, to boost investment and research infrastructure, and foster collaboration, training and public engagement.

Chibale says the successful growth of the H3D model is based on “networks of partnerships based on mutual interest, mutual responsibility, mutual accountability and mutual respect. That’s why Covid vaccines were developed so quickly, because there were unprecedented levels of partnerships.” He adds: “So if we could take that model to any other disease, we will find solutions to these problems more quickly.”