As part of our commitment to fostering a culture of knowledge-sharing and lifelong learning within the African drug discovery community, we are proud to present regular live webinars featuring cutting-edge research by scientists from across the globe.
If you missed any of the recent presentations, you can catch up with recordings on our YouTube page. Here is a quick overview of the topics covered in the first four months of 2026:
Writing a successful translational grant funding proposal with Dr Laura Stennett
Dr Laura Stennett is a Senior Business Development Manager at LifeArc, focused on building collaborations and strategic partnerships to deliver impact for those living with a rare disease. In this webinar Stenett discusses the typical funding process for a translational research project and presents how to develop a compelling, successful translational research funding application. The aim is to equip researchers working in the translational space with the skills to identify appropriate funding streams, write high-quality applications and provide insight into how funding decisions are made.
Watch here
Patients as partners: the power of advocacy & community engagement in medical innovation with Carolyn Hall
Carolyn (Cali) Hall is an Alliance Manager for Global Health at LifeArc, with extensive experience from the Novartis Foundation, where she worked on strengthening health systems and developing community health models across India, Vietnam, Cambodia, and sub-Saharan Africa. Her career has been driven by a deep commitment to improving patient outcomes in low- and middle-income countries, raising standards of care, and reducing barriers to access. Cali is particularly focused on “feet-on-the-ground” implementation, translating strategy into practice through collaboration and behaviour change among local stakeholders to achieve lasting impact. In this webinar, she shares insights drawn from this hands-on experience.
Watch here
Natural Products from Africa for Solutions to Global Health Challenges with Prof Fidele Ntie-Kang
Prof Fidele Ntie-Kang is an Associate Professor of Pharmaceutical Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Buea, Cameroon, where he also heads the Centre for Drug Discovery. His research focuses on chemoinformatics and the exploration of natural products for drug discovery, with a particular passion for compounds derived from African medicinal plants. A major contribution to the field is the development of the African Natural Products Database, which currently contains over 11,000 compounds and more than 1,700 species from across the continent. In this webinar, he shares insights from his work at the intersection of computational chemistry and natural product research.
Watch here.
In Vitro & In Vivo Models That Made Acoziborole Possible for African Sleeping Sickness with Dr Bakela Nare
Dr Bakela Nare is a drug discovery scientist and biotechnology leader with more than 25 years of experience advancing novel therapeutics from early discovery through to development across both human and animal health. Trained as a parasitologist, he has led multidisciplinary research programmes spanning infectious and non-infectious diseases, including trypanosomiasis, malaria, leishmaniasis, oncology, CNS disorders, dermatitis, pain, parasitic diseases of livestock and companion animals, and vector control. His work combines disease modelling, translational pharmacology, and DMPK to support the discovery and development of new drug candidates. In this webinar, Nare explores how in vitro and in vivo models guided the early discovery and optimisation of acoziborole, ultimately helping to advance it into a clinical candidate.
From Discovery to Depot: A Framework for Long-Acting Injectable Drug Design with Dr Karsten Menzel
As a Senior Principal Scientist in DMPK at MSD, Dr Karsten Menzel provides decisive scientific and strategic leadership to drive drug discovery and development programs forward. His work spans diverse therapeutic areas, including infectious diseases, cardiometabolic disease, oncology, and neuroscience, with a proven track record of advancing compounds from discovery through first-in-human studies and ultimately to regulatory approval. His expertise is in characterising small-molecule and biologics ADME properties, predicting human efficacious doses, and assessing drug-drug interaction liabilities to shape robust clinical strategies and support successful global regulatory submissions. His current focus is on applying model-informed drug discovery to enhance research in resource-limited settings and integrating machine-learning models to accelerate daily decision-making in drug discovery.
Launch of the RAFIKI Handbook for Planning and Hosting Capacity-Development Fellowships
Research fellowships play a vital role in strengthening scientific capacity globally, and are especially critical across Africa’s research landscape. Getting their design right is key to ensuring meaningful, sustainable impact. In this Webinar we are joined by a panel of RAFIKI consortium partners to launch the Handbook for Planning and Hosting Capacity-Development Fellowships.
Visit the RAFIKI website and download the handbook here.
If you haven’t yet, we invite you to join us for these thought-provoking and inspiring discussions. Keep an eye on our social media profiles and be sure to join our mailing list for regular updates.
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