Patrick Kobina Arthur
Head of Training and Research

Dr. Patrick Kobina Arthur is lecturer at Department of Biochemistry, Cell and Molecular Biology of the University of Ghana. He also serves as the Head of Training and Research at the West African Centre for Cell Biology of Infectious Pathogens. He obtained his PhD in Developmental Biochemistry at the University of Göttingen in Germany. He has undertaken several post-doctoral fellowships at the University of Maryland - College Park, USA, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich (ETH-Zurich) and the Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge in the UK. His research activities are in the area Chemical Systems Biology of Infectious Pathogens that comprises Infection Biology of Tuberculosis, etc., Chemical Biology of Fungal Metabolites, Advanced Imaging Techniques and Mass Spectrometry-based Proteomics of the perturbations caused in infectious pathogens by novel bioactive compounds. The mission of Dr. Arthur's research is towards the discovery and development of new antibiotics against tropical infectious diseases. Towards the discovery of novel anti-infective agents, his research group has presently isolated and screened more than three thousand distinct fungal species. The surprisingly high rate of the occurrence of anti-infective activities in the culture extracts of these fungi has led the group to develop a phenotypic array-based workflow as a key strategy. This allows for the comparison of the bioactive extracts of many standard antibiotics on the basis of their pattern of activities across different physiological conditions of the test organisms. Dr. Arthur’s group is currently in the process of isolating pure compounds from fungal extracts from the priority list. These compounds will be extensively characterized using NMR-structural elucidation, advanced imaging techniques and mass spectrometry-based proteomics to provide understanding of their mechanism of action to support pre-clinical development. Dr. Arthur has won a number of research grants from a number of organizations, such as DAAD-Germany, Grand Challenges Canada, TWAS-Italy, IFS-Sweden, and Gates Foundation/ NMIMR. Dr. Arthur was also selected as a fellow to attend the Lindau Nobel Laureates Meeting as well as a member of the Global Young Academy (GYA) in 2012 where he served as a non-voting member of the Executive Committee of the GYA from 2012-2013.