South Africa just opened a lab-to-medicine factory so Africa can make its own drugs

President Cyril Ramaphosa launched FuturePHARMA in Tshwane — an open-access pharmaceutical facility at the CSIR designed to carry promising lab research across the gap into real medicines, including the raw ingredients other factories need. The idea: COVID showed what happens when a continent must import its health security. Now Africa's researchers get a shared home to develop, test, and scale their own.