46 years at Wits: How Professor Patrick Arbuthnot helped shape gene therapy in Africa
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As a medical student, he became increasingly drawn to biology and science, particularly the molecular mechanisms underlying disease.
At the time of his retirement at the end of 2025, Professor Patrick Arbuthnot, former head of the Antiviral Gene Therapy Research Unit (AGTRU), had been at Wits for 46 years. His fascination with the underlying mechanisms of disease was the holy grail of his long career, during which he helped turn a once-basic laboratory into a successful unit of the South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC).
After graduating as a medical doctor and completing his internship in 1986, Patrick formally entered academia under the leadership of Wits professor Wynfried Fitschen. He submitted his PhD in 1992 and had the opportunity to pursue postdoctoral studies in gene therapy at an INSERM unit based at the renowned paediatric hospital, Necker-Enfants Malades in Paris. There, he worked under the direction of Prof Christian Bréchot, the former Director of the Pasteur Institute and a leading figure in hepatitis B virus (HBV) research.
Another figure, Dr Nicolas Ferry, helped Professor Arbuthnot cut his teeth in what was then an emerging field of gene therapy. “In the early 1990s, gene therapy was still largely experimental and very much a frontier technology. It was, however, full of promise. My time in Paris was formative, and I am grateful I was there just as the field began to take shape.”
When Professor Arbuthnot returned to Wits in 1994, he helped establish a laboratory focused on HBV and gene-based therapeutics. HBV was, and remains, a major health challenge in Africa.
“In that lab, the technologies were limited. We worked with ribozymes to cleave viral RNA. While conceptually elegant, these approaches proved inefficient in practice,” he said. The lab has advanced to applying more efficient gene-silencing and gene-editing technologies. This included use of RNA interference, transcription activator-like effector nucleases (TALENS) and CRISPR-based systems. Eventually, the lab became an extramural SAMRC unit, which was a significant milestone in AGTRU’s development.
Professor Arbuthnot has supervised 26 PhD students, many of whom have taken on leadership roles in gene therapy worldwide. Two of his former students, Professor Abdullah Ely and Dr Kristie Bloom, are now leaders at AGTRU. A former postdoctoral fellow in the unit, Prof Betty Maepa, leads efforts to advance engineered viruses for vaccination and therapy. Another team member, Dr Kubendran Naidoo, is developing the exciting C1 technology for the highly efficient production of protein-based vaccines and therapies from thermophilic fungi. Maepa and Naidoo are also exploring the promising use of organoids for modelling and treating viral infections, particularly HBV.
Patrick Arbuthnot and his colleagues also recently patented an ionisable lipid technology, which they plan to commercialise through a startup company called Green Lipids. Licensing intellectual property to Green Lipids is a culmination of years of groundwork, accelerated during the pandemic. After COVID-19, AGTRU rapidly pivoted to vaccine development, viral vector technologies, and mRNA-based platforms in response to a public health emergency. This work was sponsored by the WHO and the Medicines Patent Pool (MPP), as well as by governments and various funding agencies.
“We had established the basic molecular biology required for mRNA production, but it was a career-defining moment when we realised that we were the only academic lab in Africa to produce its own mRNA constructs in-house”, said Professor Arbuthnot.
Alongside Professor Arbuthnot, Drs Ely and Bloom have been instrumental in setting up Green Lipids and the technology that underpins it: converting cashew nutshell liquid, an abundant bio-renewable agricultural waste product in Africa, into the ionisable lipids essential for mRNA vaccine formulation. This technology has been established in partnership with the team of Prof Charles de Koning from the Wits School of Chemistry.
Now that Professor Arbuthnot has entered emeritus status, he has shown how scientists can pivot quickly in times of global health crises, speak strongly in favour of health equity and African research and development, become entrepreneurs, and impact broader society. The laboratory he was part of all these decades ago has evolved into a prestigious, globally recognised research unit that has trained many highly competitive scientists.