about us

History

Several research activities within Stellenbosch University focus on aspects within the broad context of drug discovery and health innovation. The latter remains a pivotal objective to provide relevant solutions to combat health crises on a continent that faces unique healthcare challenges. Recent developments and investments at the SU provided for real opportunities for meaningful enhancement and growth of the institution’s position in the health innovation space – specifically by consolidating and nucleating critical mass in this area at SU into a cross-cutting, coherent, interdisciplinary entity. Established as a Type 1 academic entity at SU since 2025, ACTI provides a meaningful platform for integrated activities, oversight, strategic vision and impact within the broad focus area of drug discovery and therapeutics innovation and will provide a vehicle for focused fundraising to support these activities.

Research2
Research

Drug discovery research that leads to health innovations is by nature interdisciplinary, with an intense stakeholder-driven remit translating to trans-disciplinarity. This typically entails contributions from the broad disciplines of chemistry, biology and pharmacology. By nature of the know-how and discipline focus, the expertise and activities contained within the ACTI is differentiated from other regional and continental efforts in drug discovery.  Specifically, the ACTI will focus on delivering a much-needed mechanistic understanding of drug action, with strong support from experimental (in vivo and ex vivo) and mathematical disease translational models. Without such information, the value chain in delivering clinical drug candidates is incomplete. Several other international consortia have consolidated efforts in this area, but such a well-designed, multidimensional platform does not exist in Africa. With a strong focus on disease biology and mechanistic knowledge underpinning therapeutics innovation (drug discovery and delivery), the ACTI fills a critical gap in drug discovery capabilities in South Africa and Africa and complement other regional activities.

Vision

The vision for ACTI is to be the leading centre on the African continent for performing biology-focused research that supports drug discovery and therapeutics innovation by providing mechanistic insight and understanding.

Mission

The ACTI’s mission is to consolidate and strengthen interdisciplinary research in expertise areas focused on biology and mechanistic understanding of drug action, to promote drug discovery and therapeutic innovation through research, teaching and platform development and to be a cornerstone and pivotal partner to other drug discovery centres and networks in Africa and globally.

Objectives

Training

The ACTI brings together researchers with the tools, knowledge and connections to conduct interdisciplinary drug discovery research projects by providing critical expertise on disease biology and mechanistic knowledge and to promote therapeutics innovation. The centre pursues the following key objectives:

  1. To drive and facilitate interdisciplinary research that delivers mechanistic understanding of drug action to facilitate the progress of entities through the drug discovery pipeline.
  2. To provide key research platforms that support drug discovery from a biological perspective.
  3. To support training of early-career researchers from Africa in the principles and complexities underlying the drug discovery pipeline from a biological perspective.
  4. To communicate best-practice learnings related to biology-focused drug discovery research including FAIR guiding principles to promote knowledge dissemination.
  5. To promote collaboration and networking with both internal, regional and global role-players and partners.
Back To Top