Master’s graduate develops cost-effective hypertension drug

Prof Watts and our team of 20 postgraduates and two postdoctoral researchers are at the stage where we are ready to start manufacturing pharmaceutical drugs at scale for a range of critical illnesses in our lab. Just as I’m working on hypertension, others are working on drugs for AIDS, TB, malaria, cancer and diabetes, as well for common illnesses including influenza.

Medication costs are often highlighted as one of the biggest direct contributors to insufficient treatment of critical illnesses. To reduce the total cost of drug procurement for hypertension and other drugs in South Africa and throughout Africa, we need to locally manufacture the active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), which is the principal component in pharmaceutical drugs. We can do this with a technology we are using in the Chair called continuous flow synthesis, which could reduce the cost of these drugs by 20% to 30%.

In any pharmaceutical drug, about 70% of the cost of the drug is the API. The other 30% is to formulate the APIs into tablets or ‘finished drugs’. Our team is looking to partner with pharmaceutical companies to produce the finished drugs, and there are a number of pharmaceutical companies in South Africa that can do this.

Currently, South Africa imports the vast majority of APIs from China and India. South Africa’s import of pharmaceutical products is over US$2.42 billion (UN Comtrade 2024 database on international trade).

Using continuous flow synthesis, we are already able to produce smaller quantities of Enalapril and other drugs, but to upscale production we are waiting for the completion of a new state-of-the-art laboratory the university is currently constructing for us.

Establishing pharmaceutical manufacturing capacity at scale is complex and the Chair has committed over 12 years of research into developing continuous flow synthesis technology to manufacture the APIs. The technology would also significantly reduce the time taken in conventional batch procedure to produce the drugs.

For my doctorate I am staying in the same field of hypertension medicine but focusing on another drug essential for its treatment – a diuretic called Indapamide. Hypertension requires what we call triple combination therapy, including drugs like Enalapril (which are angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors – commonly called ACE inhibitors), in combination with diuretics and statins.

I’m fortunate to be funded by the National Research Foundation as I am passionate about academia and research. After my PhD my goal is to continue with postdoctoral research.

I’m so appreciative of my family who have been very supportive of my academic career. My mother Thabiso Kota who raised me, continually encouraged me to study hard, which fortunately came naturally to me. Both my mother and my father worked hard to send me to a fee-paying school called Lawson Brown High School in Gqeberha where I was head boy in matric.

I was always interested in physical science, and was further inspired by my science teacher from Grade 10 to 12, Mr Quinton Plaatjies. In Grade 12 we were introduced to organic chemistry and I just loved it. The fact that everything around us is chemistry, especially organic chemistry, fascinated me. I was intrigued that a pharmaceutical drug could have a specific effect on the body and I knew I wanted to do something in this field.

This led to my BSc from 2020 – 2022, followed by my Honours in the Department of Chemistry, funded by a postgraduate research scholarship from the university. In my Honours year I met Prof Watts and from the moment he introduced me to flow chemistry I knew I wanted to work with him in this whole new world. I only realised how big he is in his field after I started my Master’s, and I would not have got to where I am today without his guidance. He inspires the whole team to achieve at the highest level and we cannot wait for the new lab to be up and running, because then things will get even more interesting as we start manufacturing at scale.