CAPTION: Cellular machinery inside the plants produces a target molecule, which can be extracted and purified for testing in clinical trials.
Africa will not be last in line when the next global pandemic hits, CSIR scientists told President Cyril Ramaphosa at the official opening of the new FuturePHARMA national research facility, which took place in Pretoria on 7 October 2026. “We first conceived of FuturePHARMA in 2019, as part of the CSIR’s industrial development strategy.
A hallmark of the pharmaceuticals sector is the heavy import dependence, with 98% of active pharmaceutical ingredients being imported into the country. On the other hand, South Africa contributes significantly to early-stage science outputs; our handicap is converting these outputs into products on the market. The strategic intent for FuturePHARMA is to convert South African science outputs into pharmaceutical products, industrial capability and health security,” says Dr Rachel Chikwamba, Group Executive: CSIR Advanced Chemistry and Life Sciences.
“As that vision was unfolding, the Covid-19 pandemic hit and it became very clear to us that we were on the right path,” she says, explaining that Africa was at the back of the global queue for imported vaccines and many patients suffered as supply chains for other medicines were disrupted.
CSIR FuturePHARMA’s doors are open to universities and small businesses looking to turn their pharmaceutical product concepts into clinical-grade materials ready for testing. The facility forms part of the CSIR’s industrial strategy to convert South African science into pharmaceutical products, industrial capability and health security. Its laboratories are geared to localise any biological or chemical process to produce medicines like vaccines, anaesthetics, painkillers, antivirals against infectious diseases, as well as treatments for chronic illnesses like tuberculosis, HIV/Aids and diabetes. This will ensure that come the next pandemic or health crisis, Africa will not be last in line.
“It was imperative that South Africa develops a strategic and sovereign capability to make critical health products that it requires and to capacitate itself to deal with future pandemics,” says Chikwamba.
CAPTION: A vacuum infiltration system and genetic engineering tools are used to introduce genetic sequences into the leaves
Over the next few years, the CSIR secured support from National Treasury through the Department of Science, Technology and Innovation (DSTI), as well as the Gates Foundation, the South African Medical Research Council, the Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit, and the Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau development bank.
“The challenge is that you cannot build emergency preparedness for pandemics and epidemics during the emergency itself. So, we have established FuturePHARMA as an innovation sandbox during normal or non-pandemic times, which can be rapidly reconfigured to make clinical-grade products in a health crisis,” she says.
“A pharmaceutical manufacturing sandbox is a controlled environment for testing, validating and scaling new products, manufacturing technologies, quality systems, workforce capabilities, and business models before commercial deployment, strengthening health security and local manufacturing competitiveness”, explains Chikwamba.
The facility is now complete and operational, capable of scaling up biological and chemical production processes to quickly bridge the gap between the discovery of a useful medical molecule and its safe, commercial manufacture. “The last hurdle to channel our products to clinical evaluation is qualification of our facility by the South African Health Products Regulatory Authority,” she says.
Its laboratories are geared to localise any biological or chemical process, and to discover new processes to produce medicines like vaccines, antibody therapeutics, anaesthetics, painkillers, antivirals against infectious diseases, as well as treatments for chronic illnesses like tuberculosis, HIV/Aids and diabetes.
“We call it a translational facility because it translates early research and development towards what we call investigational manufacturing for clinical trial testing,” says CSIR chief researcher Dr Tsepo Tsekoa. He leads a FuturePHARMA team focusing on vaccines and biologics, which are produced in living organisms like plants, yeast, bacteria and mammalian cells.
Vaccines and biologics are only part of pandemic preparedness. Many other essential medicines that are still needed during a crisis, such as headache tablets or chemotherapies, require small molecules known as active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs).
Such small molecules are made through chemistry rather than biological means, and are then mixed with other ingredients to create a formulated tablet or liquid medicine. API production is the focus on the small molecules laboratory of FuturePHARMA, which is led by CSIR chief researcher, Dr Jenny-Lee Panayides. Her team is already working on scaling up the production of APIs for pain relief and breast cancer treatment.
Chikwamba says everyday translational research activities in the biological and chemical laboratories “keep the capability warm” by making critical active pharmaceutical ingredients, vaccines and biologics, developing new processes, training students and supporting workforce training in industrial engineering and good manufacturing practice.
| WHO names CSIR as a designated African biomanufacturing training hub The World Health Organisation (WHO) has officially designated the CSIR as a regional training centre for biomanufacturing for the African Region during a meeting at its Geneva headquarters in June 2026. “This global programme focuses on biomanufacturing workforce development and training, with goals that are aligned to the CSIR’s commitment to strengthening local manufacturing of vaccines, biologics and therapeutics across the African continent,” says CSIR chief researcher Dr Santosh Ramchuran. Ramchuran, who has been leading the Biomanufacturing Workforce Training and Skills Development Programme at the CSIR for several years, says the designation by the WHO now brings existing localisation efforts to the global stage.Read more: https://www.csir.co.za/media-hub/news/who-names-csir-as-its-african-biomanufacturing-training-hub. |
“We de-risk the production of medicines that we know are of priority to our country, and then we transfer the mature product, prototypes, protocols and workforce to industry, she says. “This sandbox sustains our readiness for a crisis mission.”
Tsekoa says that when a pandemic arises, his laboratory is ready to receive genetic information from the National Institute for Communicable Diseases and universities. “This is what we call surveillance data, showing that there’s a spike in a particular disease.”
He explains that CSIR scientists could then use genetic engineering tools to manufacture a vaccine against the virus or other disease agents, first at small scale, to test its efficacy.
“Once we have some data to indicate that it’s beginning to work, we would begin to scale up the production in the same facility and then produce it for phase one clinical trials, to test it for the first time in humans,” he says.
Tsekoa’s research team works in highly regulated clean rooms with filtered air, specialised surfaces and sterile equipment to ensure that products are safe, according to international standards of good manufacturing practice.
“We have very strong surveillance science in South Africa, and we also do have manufacturers of vaccines that are active in the commercial and clinical space,” says Tsekoa. “The missing link around translating gene sequences into products that can protect the country is what we have now established at FuturePHARMA.”
Panayides adds that South Africa’s industry is already strong in formulation (combining ingredients to create a tablet or liquid medicine) as well as distribution (getting medicine on pharmacy shelves). The gap FuturePHARMA can now fill is local manufacture of active ingredients, which further enables rapid response to fluctuating drug demand in a crisis.
“Firstly, we create the ecosystem where local companies could actually compete internationally in terms of the cost of the drug that they’re producing,” she says.
FuturePHARMA also hosts the Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients Innovation Cluster on behalf of the DSTI and the Technology Innovation Agency. “It pulls together resources from universities that undertake proof-of-concept of processes to see how they can produce active ingredients using different technologies, and industry partners who have the capacity to do good manufacturing practice production or larger-scale production when needed.”
Panayides says the second aspect is around pandemic preparedness.
“We brought into the country a technology called continuous flow chemistry, which is basically where you’re doing your reactions in continuous streams, not in big vat reactors,” she says. “That allows us to produce active ingredients much, much faster and with a much smaller footprint, so that we can access those materials that we need rapidly, and we can do distributed manufacturing at the site where we need them.”
Chikwamba says FuturePHARMA’s doors are now officially open to universities and small businesses looking to turn their pharmaceutical product concepts into clinical-grade materials ready for testing.
“The next phase of FuturePHARMA is a contract development and manufacturing capability, which expands the scale at which we can do this work,” she says. CSIR researchers will then explore how to competitively make critical day-to-day medicines while on stand-by to generate products at scale in a crisis.
“If the science is right, we can make it at scale, we can make it safely, and we can make it at home,” says Chikwamba. – CSIR
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