• Daystar University
• 10 Nov, 2023

By Jean Murungi

In June 2022, the Daystar Company Limited, the body that sponsors Daystar

University, appointed Prof. George Njoroge Chairman of the Daystar University Council for a renewable term of three years.

A letter signed by the Chair of Daystar Company Board of Trustees, the Rev. Dr. Matthews Mwalw’a, indicated that his term would effectively start on 1st July 2022, and last until 30th June 2025. Prof. Njoroge took over from Prof. Henry Moses Thairu who had served since 2018.

Prof. George Njoroge wears many hats. He is a member of the Board of Directors as well as the Chair of Research and Innovation Committee at the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI), and a Board Member of the KCA University. He is also the Chief Scientific Advisor at Kenyatta University Teaching, Referral and Research Hospital (KUTRRH).

P r o f. George Njoroge is the Founder and Chairman of the Centre of Africa’s Life Sciences (C O A L S), a premier institution that is being e s t a b l i s h e d

in Naivasha, Kenya, with the primary goal of searching and developing novel medicines in Africa. Previously, he was a Director in the Department of Medicinal Chemistry at Merck Research Laboratories and Senior Research Fellow at Eli Lilly and Company, two major international pharmaceutical companies.

Prof. Njoroge spent more than three decades developing novel therapeutics for cancer and viruses. One of those medicines, Victrelis®, was the first drug to directly target the virus that causes hepatitis C, a disease that afflicts more than 70 million people around the world and can lead to severe liver damage and even death; this medicine was approved by FDA on 13th, May 2011 as the first- in-class therapy for HepC treatment. Prof. Njoroge led his Chemistry in the discovery of the second-generation HCV protease inhibitor Narlaprevir® that has completed Phase IIb clinical trials and is currently marketed in Russia as Arlansa.

He has also worked extensively in the cancer area, especially in the discovery of therapeutic agents geared towards intervention of signal trunsduction process in proliferating cells. This work led to the discovery of Sarasar®, now Zokinvy, a farnesyl transferase inhibitor that has been approved for the treatment of Progeria – a life threatening disease that causes accelerated aging in children.

Prof. Njoroge is a First-class honours graduate of the University of Nairobi, following which he completed his PhD in organic Chemistry at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio in 1985, before joining Schering Plough Research Institute (SPRI) in 1988.

Prof. Njoroge has published extensively in professional journals on synthetic organic Chemistry and drug design. He is an author and co-author of 136 scientific publications and 104 USA granted patents.

On 19th August 2012, Prof. Njoroge was inducted into the “Hall of Fame” as the latest Hero of Chemistry by the American Chemical Society (ACS) at a ceremony held in Philadelphia. He is a recipient of numerous awards, including Emerald Award for Professional Achievement in Industry and Thomas Alva Edison Patent Award for emerging therapies. On 14th July 2018, Prof. Njoroge was honored with Pioneer Award for Impact in Science and Medicine by Face-to-Face Africa organization in New York, where he received recognition as the first African ever to be granted over 100 patents by the US patenting agency.

In 2014, Prof. Njoroge was conferred with an Honorary Degree of Pharmaceutical Science by Mount Kenya University, and awarded another Honorary Doctoral Degree by KCA University in Kenya on 26th November 2021. In 2020, he was recipient of year of the Outstanding Alumnus Award of Chemistry at Case Western Reserve University, his alma mater.

As a result of his achievements, Prof. Njoroge was appointed Honorary Professor of Medical Education in the prestigious University of Manchester in the United Kingdom on 15th March 2022.

Speaking to the Star newspaper in Kenya recently, Prof. Njoroge remarked: “This was as a result of my accomplishments in the discovery of new medicines for the treatment of such diseases as Hepatitis C and Progeria. I was the first African to receive over 100 issued patents by US patent agency.”

Lessons from a Traditional Herbalist

Njoroge was born in Kamuchege village, 25 miles outside of Nairobi, in 1954, during the waning days of British colonial rule. The previous year, his maternal grandfather had been killed by British forces seeking to quash the nationalist Mau Mau uprising.

When Njoroge was three years old, his mother, a single parent, got engaged and went to live in a distant village, leaving him under his grandmother’s care. Food was scarce, and he did not always have shoes to wear.

“It was a very difficult time,” Njoroge says. “But it formed a good background for me to appreciate my latter life.”

Njoroge’s grandmother was a traditional herbalist who seemed to have a cure for almost every ailment. Later, while studying Chemistry at the University of Nairobi, Njoroge realized that many of her plant-based treatments actually contained medicinal compounds, and that her methods for concocting them—boiling certain roots and herbs in tea, for instance, and simmering others in oil—made scientific sense.

“She wasn’t a Chemist since she never went to school,” Njoroge says. Nonetheless, “she knew how to extract the active agents.” In a 2021 interview with a Kenyan newspaper, he remarked, “The glamour and respect that my grandmother received from our community encouraged me to get an education where I could be in a career similar to hers.”

Njoroge eventually attended Thika High School, a boys-only boarding school founded by British missionaries in a nearby town. Being admitted was a mark of distinction: Thika accepted only one student from Kamuchege, a village of 6,000 inhabitants, each year. Although Njoroge’s favorite subject was biology, coming from a poor family had convinced him that a future as a doctor or scientist was way out of reach. Instead of taking the advanced courses required for university entry, he decided to complete school and begin earning money as quickly as possible. But when his British Maths and Biology teachers found out about his plans, they promised to help finance his studies.

“I got a lot of help and motivation from those people,” he says. “I think it contributed a lot to my success.”

During his senior year at Thika High School, Njoroge was presented with a prize in Biology by Prof. Joseph Mungai, the first African to serve as Dean of School of Medicine at the University of Nairobi. Under the Kenyan educational model of that time, students could enter the university and immediately pursue a five-year medical degree without first earning an undergraduate degree, and Mungai assumed Njoroge would enroll as a medical student the following year. But by then, Njoroge had acquired a different ambition. He wanted to become a game warden, like the one he’d met on a school trip to a marine park on the Indian Ocean.

“I told my biology teacher, ‘All I want to do in my life is to become like this man,’” says Njoroge, who was deeply impressed by the fleet of Land Rovers and glass-bottomed boats the warden commanded. Conveniently, achieving that goal would only require three years of undergraduate work in botany, zoology and chemistry.

Once at the university, however, Njoroge became fascinated with organic chemistry. When he learned that most modern medicines were developed through chemical synthesis, the herbalist’s grandson knew he had found his calling.

As it happened, two of Njoroge’s chemistry professors had done their graduate work at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU). They were confident that if Njoroge earned a first-class honors degree from the University of Nairobi, he could do the same. With his mentors’ encouragement, Njoroge graduated at the top of his class and earned a scholarship from CWRU.

The transition to his new life wasn’t easy. Winter in Cleveland was tough; he missed Esther, his girlfriend at the time; and his first class in Quantum Chemistry was so difficult that he began to wonder why he’d ever left Nairobi.

The situation soon improved, however. For one thing, Esther joined him, and the two would later get married in 1987.

He quickly adapted to the academic environment. Falling under the capable tutelage of the late Eric Nordlander, he co-authored several papers that eventually helped him secure employment in the pharmaceutical industry. After earning his Master’s degree, Njoroge completed his doctoral research in less than two years, thanks in part to the materials and equipment available to him at CWRU.

Njoroge knew his PhD would secure him a job as a professor back at the University of Nairobi, but he also knew that opportunities to discover new medicines in Kenya would be severely limited. So, he became a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Pathology at University Hospitals in Cleveland— where, he says, “I acquired a wealth of knowledge about research opportunities in medical areas.” Then he landed a job with the Schering-Plough Research Institute in New Jersey.

His first major project was in the field of cancer therapeutics. Seeking a way to prevent metastasis, or the spreading of cancer to new areas of the body, Njoroge focused on a protein, Ras p21, that plays an important role in the proliferation of cancer cells. Ras p21 attaches itself to the membrane of a cell

and triggers a cascade of biochemical events that cause the cell to multiply. An enzyme located on the membrane provides an opening: A portion of Ras p21 fits into a binding site on the enzyme like a key in a lock. Njoroge set about developing a small molecule that could slip into the enzyme’s binding site instead, preventing Ras p21 from fastening to the membrane in the first place.

By modifying a molecule that Schering-Plough had previously synthesized for use as an antihistamine, Njoroge developed a new drug, lonafarnib, that showed early promise in treating cancer patients but failed to make it through phase III clinical trials. Several years later, however, doctors at Boston Children’s Hospital discovered that lonafarnib reduced the risk of death among patients with progeria, a genetic disease that leads to extreme premature aging. (Most people with the condition die in their teens from heart attack or stroke.) The drug, which is marketed under the name Sarasar, received FDA approval in 2020 and remains the only medication that can improve life expectancy in children with the disease.

For his next project, Njoroge was asked to work on a treatment for hepatitis C. At the time, the only drugs available were general-purpose antivirals with relatively low cure rates. Given the devastating global impact of the disease, there was an urgent need for more effective therapies that were custom-tailored to target the virus.

As he confronted this challenge, Njoroge’s experience in cancer research served him well. Like cancer cells, hepatitis C replicates, with the help

of an enzyme, a protease that binds itself to long chains of viral proteins and chews them into smaller pieces. These pieces are then assembled into new viral particles. As with lonafarnib, Njoroge’s strategy was to synthesize a molecule that would interfere with this process from the start.

Ideally, such a molecule would fit snugly into a deep binding site on the enzyme’s surface. When he examined the structure of the protease, however, Njoroge discovered that it was unusually smooth and featureless. In the parlance of chemists, it had “shallow pockets”— though Njoroge prefers an analogy closer to his African roots.

“It was like the Kalahari Desert,” he says, laughing.

It took Njoroge 15 years to develop a molecule that could find purchase in that barren wasteland, resulting in the first FDA-approved oral protease inhibitor for the treatment of hepatitis C.

Victrelis, whose generic name is Boceprevir, quickly became part of the standard cure for the disease and paved the way for even more effective therapies—including Narlaprevir, another protease inhibitor that Njoroge subsequently developed for Schering- Plough.

In a speech he gave to graduates of Mount Kenya University in 2017, Njoroge cast the discovery of Victrelis, which ultimately saved thousands of patients who would have otherwise died from hepatitis C, as “the greatest thing that ever happened in my life.”

A Legacy of Medical Research

By the time he discovered Narlaprevir, Njoroge had been promoted to director of medicinal chemistry and was leading a team of 20 fellow chemists. After Schering-Plough was acquired by the pharmaceutical company Merck in 2009, he retained that title for two more years and then took a position as a senior researcher at Eli Lilly, where he spent nearly a decade developing cancer drugs before he and Esther moved back to Nairobi.

Njoroge and Esther have two grown children. Their daughter, Joyce, is a cardiologist at Stanford University in California, and their son, Jesse, is a pharmacist in Virginia.

The idea of developing a life sciences complex in Kenya first occurred to Njoroge some 30 years ago. Now, he is making it a reality.

Though Njoroge had visited over the years and still had family and friends in Kenya, resettling there was still a challenge: The process of translating basic research into new medicines was foreign to his Kenyan colleagues, and the country lacked the financial resources and technical capacity

he had grown accustomed to in the United States. But he soon found that his knowledge and skills were in high demand. Njoroge joined the board of the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI), the Kenyan equivalent of the National Institutes of Health in USA, and became chief scientific advisor at Kenyatta University Teaching, Referral & Research Hospital, one of the country’s top-tier medical institutions.

His primary focus, however, is on making COALS a reality. Situated on 450 acres in the Great Rift Valley, the complex will include a life sciences university, research laboratories, incubators for African biotechnology firms, and a manufacturing plant that will produce much-needed, affordable generic drugs for Kenya and other parts of the continent. In addition, Njoroge’s plan calls for an international conference center where Kenyan scientists and university students can interact with top scientists from around the world.

Njoroge started thinking about COALS some 30 years ago. “As I became more involved in drug discovery,” he says, “the idea started to become more clear and convincing to me.” He especially wants the center to help recruit, train and mentor young Kenyans so they will pursue research careers. He envisions them spending at least some time studying and working overseas, and then bearing the fruits of their experience back to their homeland.

“If I leave behind something to my mother country, that will be it,” Njoroge says. “That will be my legacy.”

Prof. Njoroge's Vision for Daystar University

Prof. Njoroge promises to be instrumental in branding Daystar University as an institution of choice for students and families, and for employees who want to become Christ-centered professionals, for a highly competitive global work force.

His mission is to generate a cadre of graduates with a Christian worldview who will differentiate themselves and stand out for success in a global interdependent society, professionals whose character will be clearly exemplified through their service.

Prof. Njoroge intends to instill a culture of research and innovation that will go beyond formal instructions. He will encourage the institution to capitalize on its competitive strength, especially in areas of communication (which cuts across all disciplines) and emerging technologies in health, and information sciences.

“I am very impressed with the current undertakings that include

Prof. Njoroge promises to be instrumental in branding Daystar University as an institution of choice for students and families, and for employees who want to become Christ-centered professionals, for a highly competitive global work force.

His mission is to generate a cadre of graduates with a Christian worldview introduction and expansion of the School of Nursing. I will push in even further for inclusion of other Health Care programs such as Medicine and Allied ones.