On 28 March 2010,Cameroon scholar Dr. Sob Tanemossu Sylvain Valère, completed his one-year academic visit at Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica (SIMM), Chinese Academy of Sciences and returned to Dschang to continue his teaching at the home country.

This visit is supported by the CAS-TWAS Postdoctoral Fellowship and has brought Dr. Valère fruitful research harvests. During the past one year, Dr Valère finished the isolation, structural identification and activity screening of three traditional Cameroon medicinal plants with anti-microbial and anti-bacterial functions and obtained more than 60 secondary metabolites. The research result will be published in Biochemical Systematics and Ecology (2010, in press).

Summarizing the achievements gained in the one-year visit, the host and Dr Valère reached friendly agreement on further cooperation in the field of Natural Products Chemistry to build the research and development strength of innovative drugs for developing countries by taking full advantage of resources and technologies in isolation, structure identification and bioactivity screening of medicinal plants.

Dr Valère felt very thankful to friends at SIMM as well as the CAS-TWAS fund. He would pass on the brand new technologies and skills he had acquired at SIMM to students at Cameron and firmly believes that the one-year research experience in Shanghai have enriched his lectures profoundly.

(Source of News: Research Team of Prof. Yang Ye)