Lecturer, Department of Pharmacology and Pharmacognosy, University of Nairobi

We are thrilled to have Dr. Eric Guantai as one of the 2012 Seeding Labs Fellows.

Eric's goal is ambitious: to establish a multidisciplinary drug discovery research program and train a new generation of African scientists in the tools and techniques of modern drug discovery.  He is structuring this work around research into new compounds that could act as anti-malarial drugs. Malaria is still a problem in Kenya and elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa. Eric is using modern computational tools to complement more conventional drug discovery techniques. His research applies high throughput virtual screening techniques, ligand docking studies, scaffold hopping and physicochemical and ADME prediction as well as in vitro and in vivo pharmacological evaluation of potential antimalarial agents.

Dr. Guantai obtained his PhD from the University of Cape Town in South Africa. After his undergraduate degree at the University of Nairobi, he served as the head of the Biological Analysis Unit of the Kenyan National Quality Control Laboratory. His work has been published in regional and international journals and presented at several international conferences.

We could not be happier to be working with Eric to help him move his important research forward.

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