Dr Armelle TsamoTontsa

Location
CameroonUniversity of Yaounde

Departments
Faculty of Sciences
Department of Organic Chemistry
Work and Research
My research focus is natural product chemistry for drug discovery. In my research, I seek to identify bioactive natural products from natural resources (plant extracts, fungi and microorganisms) that can serve as lead compounds for early preclinical drug discovery research to understand traditional medicine and ethnopharmacology and find pharmacologically functional chemical scaffolds. In the past years, I received a grant from the Royal Society of Chemistry that allowed me to successfully led research projects exploring the therapeutic potential and the discovery of bioactive molecules from Cameroonian indigenous mushrooms to fight antimicrobial resistance and improve the therapy for infectious diseases. These projects were approached from a multidisciplinary perspective, combining traditional knowledge, natural product chemistry, and biological assays with data science methodologies. My ongoing research projects aim to develop strategies for discovering new bioactive molecules by combining artificial intelligence and data science and then deposit the spectral data of these bioactive natural products in databases accessible to the entire scientific community. My integrated approach implies the elucidation of biosynthetic machinery involved in assembling new bioactive molecules through collaboration with specialised research teams worldwide to ensure the production of natural products of interest by synthetic biology. This requires a mixed-method, interdisciplinary approach as a researcher and leadership capacities to guide interdisciplinary research teams. The results of my research are published in international peer-reviewed journals of high impact (Journal of natural products, Food Research International, phytochemistry letters, Plos One, Natural Product Research…), and a high citation rate (400, H-index: 12) demonstrates the impact of my publications. Within the past ten years, I have committed myself to rigorous scientific research, teaching, supervision of students and civic engagement. In the long term, I plan to build my research unit, expanding my integrated approach into a major research theme in my institution.