Africa’s next Leapfrog: Pharma
There is a emerging disruptive technology in the pharmaceutical industry: Continuous Flow Chemistry. Despite being used by the petrochemical industry for decades, the pharmaceutical industry has been slow to react.
Africa has, such as with the telecoms and power industries, the ability to leapfrog the outdated methods employed by the pharma industry to utilize continuous flow and rise as leaders in economical manufacturing processes. The greatest barriers of adoption are the established use of batch techniques in pharmaceutical plants and the massive labour force trained in classical techniques. Africa has no such barriers: there is no significant manufacturing industry. Africa can leapfrog batch methods (employed since the 1800's) to guide the globe to green, energy efficient and less wasteful API production.
In the South African context, the government faces inefficient spending in the health sector. Most Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs) or therapies are imported at great costs, with other emerging markets such as China and India starting to benefit from investment in pharma. South Africa has the greatest HIV treatment program in the world, with the government paying for millions of antiretroviral (ARV) treatments. In response, the South African government has recently invested in a state owned pharmaceutical company: Ketlaphela.
I am a doctoral candidate in Dr. Darren Rileys’ research group at the University of Pretoria currently collaborating with Pelchem (subsidiary of NECSA) to develop possible continuous flow methods for API production for potential implementation at Ketlaphela. I am excited to join the UNLEASH Innovation lab 2017 in Denmark, hoping to bring insights from the point of view of a research chemist and young entrepreneur.
The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set out for 2030 are deliberately ambitious, and disruptive technologies are the only way to accelerate our current global efforts in alleviating poverty, combating climate change, and pursuing safe healthcare for all. Combating both communicable and non-communicable diseases in the developing world has numerous challenges, and some serious thought and investment is required to develop and implement disruptive techniques that bypass the lack of infrastructure, education and political stability. It came as a great relief to me to see that there are global efforts, such as the UNLEASH innovation lab, to deliberately ignite and initiate global collaboration in tackling these issues.
