The Wits Advanced Drug Delivery Platform, taking cutting-edge pharmaceutical sciences to the world
- Professor Yahya E. Choonara - Chair and Head of the Department of Pharmacy and Pharmacology
The Wits Faculty of Health Sciences’ commitment to excellence in research and innovation has seen one of its world-class leading research entities grow to international acclaim in the pharmaceutical sciences. Since its inception in 2007, the Wits Advanced Drug Delivery Platform (WADDP) has focused on one goal in mind; to undertake research that has a far-reaching impact in providing 21stCentury Medicines (drugs, pharmaceuticals, genetic material or other xenobiotics) to treat vast disease profiles that burden healthcare systems globally.
Building on the advances made by Faculty researchers, Professors Viness Pillay and Yahya Choonara, whose research interest in the field of pharmaceutical biomaterials and polymer-engineered therapeutic technologies made strides in exploring pharmaceutical strategies used to deliver either drugs, pharmaceuticals, genetic material or other xenobiotics in the human body to achieve a therapeutic outcome. The approach of developing new delivery systems for existing molecules is a much needed, cost-effective and faster therapeutic strategy that had rapidly evolved and given way to developing advanced therapeutic technologies encompassing proteins, nucleotides and other biologics (including cells).
“The mission was to undertake translational pharmaceutical research and generate intellectual property (IP) as a solution shop for hard to solve challenges in medicine through the discovery, design and development of first-in-the-world pharmaceutical therapies that can have a clinically meaningful impact” explains Prof Choonara, Director and Principal Researcher at the WADDP.
He says that WADDP’s team of pharmaceutical researchers are enthralled by answering the “contextually relevant and globally applicable” big questions of high impact and unmet therapeutic need. These values have led the WADDP’s role as the only pharmaceutical sciences research entity in its domain in Africa and with extensive collaborative networks worldwide. It is supported by multiple national research and innovation agencies, cross-border programs and industry.
The growth of WADDP from inception has evolved simultaneously with the significant advances in the related therapeutic fields in which the team innovates. Earlier successes had laid the foundation to explore themes beyond the realm of advanced drug delivery and included drug delivery interfaced with Nanomedicine, Tissue Engineering, Regenerative Medicine and Functional Biomaterials. This has seen it provide the largest training and research platform in Africa for individuals with a passion for pharmaceutical research related to these thematic areas. The entity has produced more than 100 postgraduates and postdoctoral fellows from across 9 countries with many students becoming emerging scientists and recipients of prestigious researcher awards with global impact in the pharmaceutical sciences.
Through its work of producing patient-centric therapeutic modalities that directly translate to medicine accessibility as well as having clinically meaningful and innovative pharmaceutical products, the work of the WADDP led to the development of pharmaceutical products with intellectual property (IP) and are commercially viable.
With the backdrop of the declining development of innovative pharmaceutical products by the local market, Prof Choonara says that the WADDP has seen its greater success in its use of technology transfer as a tool to industrialize the local and in extension global pharmaceutical sectors. It licenses its patent rights as well as its manufacturing, marketing and selling of innovative pharmaceuticals thus boosting socio-economic development in South Africa.
“The IP generated at WADDP drives the ‘business’ of science and advances skilled employment in our growing bio-economy, particularly needed for the R&D [research & development] of new high value-adding pharmaceutical products,” says Prof Choonara.
Through the years, the WADDP team has produced over 43 patents with 21 patents granted internationally in the USA, Europe, China, India and Japan. This scale of IP contribution has positioned the WADDP as the largest patent portfolio of its domain in South Africa.
In its purpose to develop patient-centric solutions, the WADDP has also been granted patents that have a great impact on human health. It has developed the world’s fastest dissolving matrix that dissolves in 0.48sec, WaferMat?, which allows for oral drug dosing in patients to occur without the need for water, chewing or swallowing. The product will soon be used with applications focused on helping patients in areas that include cancer pain, sleep, wound care and biologics.
“This method is beneficial to children, the elderly and other specific patient groups in situations where drugs are unpalatable or difficult to swallow or injectables are not practical leading to poor compliance with a necessary drug regimen” explains Prof Choonara.
Other examples of the WADDP’s patented technologies under commercialization include a resorbable wound healing system as a skin substitute that has a major impact on the outcomes of treating burn wounds, diabetic foot ulcers and venous leg ulcers; as well as the eutectic Core-Melt Tablet for the delivery of proteins/peptides via the oral route and protects the bio-actives from the harsh GIT environment.
The WADDP has made notable scholarly contributions to the body of pharmaceutical research in South Africa with a publication track record of over 350 articles published in ISI-accredited international journals. Researchers at WADDP regularly feature internationally as highly cited researchers in the Health Sciences and Stanford University’s Top 2% of global scientists in the field. Its research has recently been featured on the cover page of one of the American Chemical Society’s most prestigious scientific journals in the field of pharmacy and pharmacology.
However, Prof Choonara stresses that unless problems are clearly defined, answers cannot be found, saying that in research, sticking with familiarity even if it is not necessarily the best approach for solving problems creates barriers to translatable research.
The WADDP currently has varied ongoing research at the interface with advanced drug delivery such as host-directed therapies for killer bacterial, viral, and parasitic infectious diseases; targeted delivery in neurology, pain, ophthalmology, otolaryngology, addiction, sleep and cell/gene therapies; and minimally invasive targeted therapies to tackle hard-to-treat cancers to name a few.
“The strength at WADDP is active collaboration with a host of expert Clinicians who work at the coalface of potentially treating patients with the various technologies under development,” says Prof Choonara.