Seed, Foster, Believe, Dream and Act. Capacity Building in Kenya by Novartis Global Discovery Chemistry, Seeding Labs, the International Activities Committee, and the Computers in Chemistry Division of the ACS between 2010-2014

Novartis initiated a Fellows program for African academic scientists in 2010 in partnership with Seeding Labs, providing a 9 week-long industrial immersion experience at the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research (NIBR) in Cambridge Massachusetts. Through their scientific projects and activities, the Fellows explored new laboratory techniques and improved their scientific communication and grant writing skills. A primary aim of the program was to influence the Fellows' time in the NIBR laboratories into promoting research of potential utility to their scientific and teaching activities on returning home to their academic institutions, thus building strength in scientific capacity in Africa. As chemistry is an essential discipline in the drug-discovery process, it has been an area of focus for several visiting African Fellows and their NIBR scientific mentors. In particular, computational chemistry has minimal laboratory requirements and is ideally suited as an area for scientific capacity building in Africa. In addition, extending drug-discovery capabilities in African laboratories to assist natural products research is of interest, particularly concerning development of treatments for malaria, tuberculosis, HIV and, of recent concern, the West African Ebola outbreak. An ACS International Activities Committee Global Innovation Grant, granted in 2012 added financial momentum to this capacity building project, spurring our efforts in capturing a Canadian Grand Challenges award and the pursuit of funding from IUPAC. In 2014, this initiative reached two significant milestones, creation of its first job, a computational chemistry academic faculty position in Kenya, and the launch of an in-silico database of Kenyan natural products named Mitishamba.