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In addition to helping to advance HIV cure research in Cameroon, this collaboration also provided an opportunity for lead author Chantal Emade Nkwelle to travel from Cameroon to work at Wistar for five months, learn many of Wistar's laboratory techniques on HIV research, and transfer them back to the University of Buea.

This research is one of several discoveries on African chemical compounds that came from the collaboration between Wistar and the University of Buea Centre for Drug Discovery, which began in 2021.

"This Croton species was chosen for study because it has a long history, along with related African plants, of use in ethnomedicine. For thousands of years, people in Cameroon and neighboring countries have relied on traditional, plant-based medicine from healers to treat a variety of illnesses, from cancer to diabetes and, more recently, even HIV. Our collaboration with the Wistar Institute over and above scientific discovery has also provided us with human development capacity building," says Dr. Ntie-Kang.

Building on work from similar species of plants used in African ethnomedicine, the research team investigated whether the medicinally active compounds in C. oligandrus could be latency-reversing agents, or LRAs, substances that reactivate latent HIV.

By isolating compounds from dried powder from the plant's bark, Drs. Tietjen, Ntie-Kang, and their teams were able to run assays designed to test whether the compounds reversed HIV latency in vitro -- a hypothesis that was confirmed for four out of six isolated compounds.