African-Derived Natural Product Box (AdNPB)

Fidele Ntie-Kang of the University of Buea in Cameroon will create a set of 400 natural products of African origin for screening against a range of diseases, including TB, neglected tropical diseases, viral diseases, and malaria. The set will consist of pure compounds derived from diverse African samples, encompassing plants, fungi, and bacteria, as well as marine sources. The team will work with collaborators to collect samples from Cameroon and across the African continent. The collection will be designed to be easily and inexpensively sourced, and it will include samples of African medicinal plants with known promise. They will prepare extracts and test purified compounds in a panel of assays for relevant diseases. For compounds showing activity in these assays, they will perform computational analysis of the chemical structure to explore the potential of related compounds.