Whenever Fidele Ntie-Kang got sick as a young boy growing up in Cameroon, he was given a ground up concoction of medicinal plants. Whatever it was, it made him feel better. It also made him curious.

Fidele, a computational chemist, is now scientifically investigating those plants. His objective is to identify the ingredients that can be developed at scale to treat millions of sick people in Africa.

For centuries, Africans treated their health ailments with local medicinal plants. Relatively few drugs have been developed to treat the diseases that disproportionately affect Africa, and many continue to prefer traditional herbal remedies today because they are skeptical of Western-made medicine.

Fidele believes that Africa's medicinal plants, many of which are undocumented, have untapped curative potential much like Qinghao, a centuries-old herbal remedy in China that became the key ingredient in the current first-line antimalarial treatment called artemisinin after Chinese scientists examined its potency as a drug.

"My dream as an African scientist working in Africa is to see a day where a drug will be put in the market which was conceived by Africans and researched in Africa," said Fidele.

Fidele is creating a physical collection of 400 natural compounds from African medicinal plants. Fidele plans to collect the plants' genetic information, characterize their chemistry, and test them to determine which compounds are active and safe enough for drug development.

Step two: Train young scientists across different disciplines with the expertise to run the labs. Fidele is in the process of setting up five labs at a new drug discovery center. But today, Fidele is the only principal investigator.

Step three: Set up fully equipped analytical centers where researchers can determine the chemical structure of a compound. Researchers have had to send samples overseas for analysis due to a lack of equipment, space, and steady power supply.

It's a long journey but Fidele has been down such a road before. When he started his career in science, the field of computational chemistry was so new that he taught high school science for two years after earning his master's degree because there wasn't a professor knowledgeable enough to oversee his PhD. He self-trained in computational chemistry, completed another master's degree in physics, and landed a series of pivotal fellowships in Europe. Then, Fidele took a shot and emailed one of the authors of his favorite textbook on molecular modeling. That person, Prof. Wolfgang Sippl, invited Fidele to Germany for an internship and became his mentor and supervisor. Now, he is also his collaborator.

"I'm very optimistic in the sense that we are not where we want to go but we are not where we used to be," said Fidele.