Professor Kelly Chibale

Drug Discovery Group

Affiliations

  1. Full Member, Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine
  2. Professor, Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Science, University of Cape Town (UCT)
  3. Neville Isdell Chair in African-centric Drug Discovery & Development
  4. Director, South African Medical Research Council/UCT Drug Discovery and Development Research Unit
  5. Founder and director, UCT Holistic Drug Discovery and Development (H3D) Centre
  6. Founder and CEO H3D Foundation.
  7. Schmidt Sciences AI2050 Senior Fellow

Key Expertise

Vaccine Development

Main Research Focus

Drug discovery and the development of tools and models to contribute to improving treatment outcomes in people of African descent.

Most Significant Paper Authored in 2024

Model-informed approaches to optimizing therapeutics in African patient populations. Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics.

Mulubwa, M., & Chibale, K. (2024)


In this paper we explored model-informed approaches to address pharmacokinetics variability in African populations due to genetic differences in the expression and activity of drug metabolizing enzymes and potential impact of Mycobacterium tuberculosis-mediated drug metabolism. We conclude that application of physiologically-based pharmacokinetic models that factor in genetic variants predicted from artificial intelligence or built using in vitro drug metabolism data from African liver subcellular fractions with integrated effects of Mycobacterium tuberculosis can help design doses tailored to African populations.