UNISA CAES Celebrates Biotech Research Partnership
We are pleased to inform you about UNISA CAES Celebrates Biotech Research Partnership
Unisa’s College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences (CAES) recently celebrated the signing of a memorandum of agreement (MOA) between the university and Buboo (Pty) Ltd, a pharmaceutical company based at the Innovation Hub in Pretoria.
The Technology and Human Resources for Industry Programme (THRIP) instrument of the Department of Trade and Industry gave a sizeable grant to conduct research and increase research capacity in South Africa. THRIP requires industry awardees to forge partnerships with universities, and Buboo chose Unisa as a partner.
Buboo and Unisa will collaborate to conduct biomedical research and train master’s and doctoral students in biomedical research, especially drug discovery and development.
In his welcome and opening address, the Acting Executive Dean of CAES, Professor Monde Ntwasa thanked the Vice-Principal: Research, Innovation, Postgraduate Studies and Commercialisation, Professor Thenjiwe Meyiwa, for hosting the event and also for helping to accelerate the MOA. He acknowledged the co-founders of Buboo for initiating the partnership. He said that the partnership would develop great technological solutions because both Unisa and Buboo have a common interest in drug discovery and development research.
Ntwasa said the grand scheme of Buboo is in synthetic biology: “Synthetic biology is primarily about redesigning living organisms to solve problems in medicine, manufacturing, agriculture, etc. It’s a unique niche in biotechnology, and it is awesome. It’s an exciting branch of genetic engineering that deserves to be called ‘biological engineering’. Our mutual scientific endeavour relies highly upon genomics, computational modelling and automation to facilitate high-throughput data generation.”
Ntwasa further stated that the common technological interests between Buboo and Unisa should produce helpful solutions in agriculture. “I am proud to say that this partnership shall produce one PhD candidate this year through a bursary. Furthermore, there are three Masters of Science candidates, whom we have just enlisted.”
In his response, Jonathan Lembelani Daka, co-founder of Buboo said that Unisa is a very welcoming environment and that celebrating the MOA between Buboo and Unisa is a significant step forward and much appreciated.
He mentioned that Buboo was officially formalised in 2016 after the founders came to the worrying realisation that many technologies exist but that the Global North dominates technological innovations.
They realised that the best approach was harnessing new technology, which giant corporations have not yet dominated. Hence, they looked at the biological sciences and chose synthetic biology. They then approached the Innovation Hub and were admitted for incubation. “It was then easy for us to approach funders and tell them that the Innovation Hub says that we are good enough,” said Daka. “We have to leverage institutions’ power; we have their backing, and they believe in us.”
In her overview address and word of thanks, Meyiwa commented that she was excited about signing the MOA. She regards this as a significant step forward that is well aligned with the university’s strategic aims. She expressed excitement that the memorandum will not gather dust and the partnership is already producing excellent outcomes such as postgraduate degree candidates.
In Meyiwa’s words: “As a university, we have big dreams, and as they say, you must not be afraid to dream big; you may call us dreamers and crazy because this kind of partnership comes from dreamers. Unisa is hopeful that it will see much more work happening and much more college visibility”.
Buboo has laboratory facilities at the Innovation Hub in Pretoria, while the Unisa laboratories are located at the university’s Florida campus. The two parties will share the use of these facilities to conduct research and train master’s and doctoral candidates.
* By Poppie Khoza, Communication and Marketing Specialist, Unisa College of Agriculture and Environmental Science