Cannabis and Khat in Drug Discovery : The Discovery Pipeline and the Endocannabinoid System

A member of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the Phytochemistry Society of Europe (PSE), the National Organization for the Professional Advancement of Black Chemists and Chemical Engineers (NOBCChE), and an Associate Member of the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), Andrew is a Medicinal Chemist trained under the Wellcome Center for Anti-infectives Research (WCAiR) at the Division of Biological Chemistry and Drug Discovery, School of Life Sciences, University of Dundee in Scotland as part of his PhD studies. He also did his PhD at the Mbarara University of Science and Technology under the Pharm-Biotechnology and Traditional Medicine Centre in Uganda and attended a Phytochemistry PhD summer School at Kenya's Egerton University on a DAAD scholarship.
His main area of interest is drug design and development using medicinal chemistry aspects and various computational and synthetic techniques to obtain logical hits to leads for particular biological targets from synthetic scaffolds in various libraries, de novo as well as from natural products. He did his MSc degree in Applied Chemistry (Natural Product Chemistry). He has a passion to coach and train upcoming drug discoverers to search for drugs beyond plant extracts to compound level towards optimization.
Before joining the academia, Andrew served in various portfolios including but not limited to being Quality Assurance Manager for Valid Nutrition's therapeutic foods' factory, assistant Quality Manager (Shifts controller) for Alliance one international tobacco processors and graduate trainee for the Japanese Tobacco International (JTI), Malawi factory. He founded Leptons Scientific consultants in 2011 and has provided consultancy services in his areas of expertise to various clients. For close to a decade now, Andrew has also been researching military strategies, security and weaponry among others. He studied intelligence analysis and is trained in H2H close combat.
He has published various journal articles and book chapters with various publishers such as Elsevier and is a reviewer for various journals including Systematic Reviews, Tuberculosis and of late, the African Health Sciences among others. Apart from this book, he is also the lead editor of the book 'Poisonous Plants and Phytochemicals in Drug Discovery' by Wiley. Currently, Andrew is a Chemistry lecturer at the Malawi University of Science and Technology in Malawi.

Tadele Mekuriya is a PhD fellow in the area of Clinical Pharmacy and Pharmacovigilance. His PhD research is in the area of Pharmacovigilance in hospitalized patients, developing and validating adverse drug-reaction risk prediction tools among the elderly population. More widely, he also works in the application of clinical pharmacy of drug agents and new chemical entities from synthetic and natural products including psychoactive agents and observe their clinical outcomes. He has 15 publications including research articles, book chapters and books. He has taught and done research at Ambo University in Ethiopia in the same field for over 5 years. Tadele is currently a Senior Lecturer of Clinical Pharmacy at Mbarara University of Science and Technology in Uganda where he is also pursuing his PhD studies.

Paul E. Alele is a pharmacologist and physician. He is presently an Associate Professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics at Mbarara University of Science and Technology in Uganda. He earned a Ph.D. (Idaho) in pharmaceutical sciences and then did postdoctoral training in developmental neurobiology investigating the influence of psychostimulants such as methylphenidate on neuronal development and activity. His research involves both basic biomedical questions using animal models, and field and clinical studies comprising human participants. He has conducted research related to khat (Catha edulis), caffeine, and ethanol, and how these substances modulate seizure expression, dependence and withdrawal. He has published peer-reviewed journal articles widely in the neurosciences, ethnopharmacology and clinical aspects of pharmacology. Dr. Alele has been teaching for over twenty years and has mentored undergraduate and postgraduate student researchers and junior faculty supported by grants from the Fogarty International Center/National Institutes of Health in the U.S.

John O. Igoli is a professor of organic chemistry. He obtained a PhD in organic chemistry specializing in natural products from the University of Nigeria Nsukka and had a six year postdoctoral training at the Strathclyde Institute of Pharmacy and Biomedical Sciences, University of Strathclyde Glasgow. He currently works at the Department of Chemistry, University of Agriculture, Makurdi Nigeria. His expertise is in the area of Phytochemistry, Ethnobotany and Natural products. Isolation and structural characterization of compounds from plants and other sources using chromatographic and spectroscopic methods and bioactivity studies against NTDs. He has over 150 publications centred on ethnobotanical studies, pharmacology, Phytochemistry and structure elucidation of novel bioactive compounds especially those with antikinetoplastid activities. He is avidly involved in training young scientists on the spectroscopic identification of compounds and the evaluation of plants used in traditional medicine. He is passionate about teaching and research collaboration. He has facilitated several structure elucidation, grant writing and research workshops. He is currently editing a special edition of Frontiers in pharmacology focused on drug discovery for neglected tropical diseases.

Fanuel Lampiao is a Professor of Reproductive Physiology at the College of Medicine, University of Malawi. He is the current Dean of Postgraduate Studies and Research. His research interests are on the influence of herbal extracts on various diseases which has culminated in the authorship of several scientific manuscripts, book chapters, as well as over 50 international and national conference presentations. He is the recipient of various national and international awards, grants and scholarships. Besides his contribution to the dissemination of research findings, he serves on the editorial board of leading publications and regularly performs reviews for international funding agencies and journals. His preferred work assignments are multifactorial and include the transfer of subject specific knowledge at undergraduate and postgraduate level, and solving intricate research questions