CSIR opens Pretoria plant to make vaccines from scratch in South Africa
Ramaphosa called the FuturePharma facility a game changer as the science council moves to turn laboratory research into medicines made on home soil.
President Cyril Ramaphosa launched the CSIR’s FuturePharma facility in Pretoria on Thursday, a plant the science council says is built to develop and manufacture medicines and vaccines inside South Africa rather than buying them from abroad.
As eNCA reported on 8 October, the president described the facility as a game changer. Speaking at the launch, he said it was remarkable that a plant from which many medicines are made could be instructed here to produce a vaccine.
“This for me is a game changer,” Ramaphosa said. He added that South Africa has a proud history of scientific achievement and that the CSIR deserved applause for what it continues to develop.
FuturePharma is designed to do two things at once. It gives researchers and pharmaceutical companies shared access to technology, expertise and facilities, and it is meant to close the distance between a promising result in a laboratory and a medicine that can actually be made and sold.
The CSIR’s own description of the facility is that it brings the two sides together so that research can be turned into treatments. Government frames the investment as part of a wider push to build local pharmaceutical manufacturing capacity and to make the supply of essential medicines more resilient.
That word, resilience, is the part ordinary patients will recognise. South Africa imports a large share of the medicines it consumes, which means a disrupted shipping route, a factory shutdown overseas or a global scramble for a vaccine can empty pharmacy shelves here within weeks. A facility that can make a product locally is a buffer against exactly that.
The gap FuturePharma is aimed at is a familiar one in South African science. The country produces strong research and trained scientists, but the step from a published paper to a registered, manufactured, distributed medicine is expensive and slow, and it is the step where local discoveries have historically stalled. The CSIR says the new facility exists to bridge it.
For the reader, the practical test will not be the launch. It will be whether products come out. A plant of this kind matters when it holds a licence to manufacture, when it has a commercial partner, and when a medicine that used to arrive in a container is instead made in Pretoria. None of that is settled by Thursday’s event, and the CSIR has not put a figure on how much of the country’s import bill FuturePharma is expected to displace, or by when.
What the launch does establish is that the institutional pieces are now in one place. The CSIR, which is South Africa’s central scientific and industrial research body, is hosting a facility explicitly intended for pharmaceutical production rather than research alone, and the presidency has attached its name to it.
Ramaphosa’s presence at the launch also signals where government wants the story to sit. The same week that pharmaceutical industry bodies have been warning about medicine shortages, the message from Pretoria is that the answer includes making more of the supply here.
Source: eNCA, Ramaphosa hails FuturePharma as a ‘game changer’ for local medicine production
