Tebello Nyokong
Chemist developing light-activated cancer therapy
At a glance
- Inventor
- Tebello Nyokong
- Life
- born 1951
- Birthplace
- Lesotho
- Country
- Lesotho / South Africa
- Region
- Africa
- Era
- 2000–Present
- Fields
- Medicine & Health, Science & Engineering
- Evidence
- Documented
- Records
- 1 in this archive
What they did
Nyokong's group at Rhodes University works on phthalocyanine dyes that gather in tumour tissue and, when illuminated with a specific wavelength, generate reactive oxygen that destroys the cell — photodynamic therapy without the systemic toxicity of chemotherapy.
Historical context
She herded sheep in Lesotho as a child and attended school in alternating weeks; she reached chemistry through a physics-and-chemistry pairing chosen almost by accident.
The legacy
She received the L'Oréal-UNESCO Award for Women in Science for Africa in 2009 and has trained a generation of South African chemists.
The evidence
L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science laureate record, 2009
Institutional recordNanotechnology and photodynamic therapy research group records
Institutional record
Documentation strength
- 2
- Sources
- 0
- Primary
- 2
- Publishers
Calculated from the sources actually attached to this record — the closer a source sits to the original document, the more it counts. It is never asserted by hand.