Prof Michael Pepper of UP’s Faculty of Health Sciences chats to Tukkievaria about his research and his hobbies, which he tackles with the same commitment as his academic work.

South Africa is probably the most suitable place on the planet to do biomedical research, says Professor Michael Pepper of the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Pretoria (UP). This is because of the country’s high disease burden, which provides lots of material for researchers, coupled with its high genetic diversity.

Being in the best place for his work on stem cells and gene therapy contributes to making Prof Pepper happy he left his adopted home in Switzerland after 18 years to return to South Africa.

“I have never looked back,” he says. Driven to make a worthwhile contribution among his own people “rather than just be another tiny wheel in a huge system”, he says there is a need in South Africa for the type of work he does. “And the opportunities are endless,” he adds. It also helps that he doesn’t have to live without sunlight for four months of the year.

He still has close ties with Switzerland: he’s retained his position at the University of Geneva as an associate professor in the Department of Genetic Medicine and Development in the Faculty of Medicine; and he co-founded the Swiss cell and gene engineering company Antion Biosciences SA in 2011, and has been a board member since 2021.

In South Africa, Prof Pepper is Director of UP’s Institute for Cellular and Molecular Medicine, as well the South African Medical Research Council’s Extramural Unit for Stem Cell Research and Therapy. With about 50 researchers including postgraduate students and postdoctoral fellows, Prof Pepper and his teams are hard at work using cellular and molecular therapy products and genetics to lower the prevalence of communicable diseases such as HIV, and non-communicable diseases such as obesity and cancer.

Also a research professor in the Faculty of Health Science’s Department of Immunology, it is no wonder that Prof Pepper features prominently on lists of excellence. He is ranked third on Research.com’s 2023 list of best scientists in biology and biochemistry in South Africa, and made Apolitical’s global list of the 100 Most Influential Academics in Government, under the policy area Recovery from COVID-19. Apolitical is a social learning network for government.

His work also includes the ethical, legal and social implications of delving into stem cells and human genetics. This extends to having chaired a study on genetics for the Academy of Science of South Africa, being part of a team assisting the Department of Health with legislation concerning human tissue, and being the most recent former president of the South African Tissue Bank Association.

Ethics have played a key role in his own life too; he is very principled. Halfway through his PhD studies at the University of Cape Town – which he had started directly after doing an MBChB degree and its one-year internship – he received notice that his military service was no longer being deferred for study purposes. He opted to leave the country.

“Not because I’m against military service, but its purpose at that point was just to maintain a regime of legislated discrimination,” he says.

And he left even though it meant abandoning his PhD “in the drawer in the lab in Cape Town, closing that chapter and starting again from scratch”.

To some extent, he more than made up for that by completing two doctorates at the University of Geneva, one in science and the other in medicine, even if he never specialised in orthopaedic surgery as planned. But he did fulfil his intention of being in academia.

Research.com states that Prof Pepper’s most popular publication is the co-written article ‘Vascular endothelial growth factor‐C‐mediated lymphangiogenesis promotes tumour metastasis’, which was published in The European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO) journal in 2001. It has had 1 345 citations. He attributes its popularity to being the first study to demonstrate clearly that a known growth factor could be overexpressed to lead to cancer metastasis – which is important because it is the spread of cancer that makes it deadly.

UP’s Institute for Cellular and Molecular Medicine that he heads started life at Netcare Unitas Hospital in Pretoria. Prof Dion du Plessis, former dean of Health Sciences at UP, invited Prof Pepper to move it “lock, stock and barrel” to the University.

“So I moved everything across, conceptually, in 2008,” he says, although the institute was formally inaugurated only in 2015.

Its international collaborations include one on birth asphyxia, or the deprivation of oxygen at birth, known as the NESHIE (Neonatal Encephalopathy with Suspected Hypoxic Ischaemic Encephalopathy) project. It is co-funded by the South African Medical Research Council and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

“Through the Gates Foundation, we have been given unprecedented access to the very best analytical laboratories in the world,” Prof Pepper says. “And some of the samples that we collected here have been analysed by these laboratories, mainly on the West Coast of the US. So we're ending up with the highest possible quality data but on our patients, with our samples.”

Prof Pepper begins almost every day riding his horses that are stabled in Midrand.

“I ride competitively, doing dressage and show jumping,” he says. He is also a competitive ballroom dancer and most recently took part in the Latin American section of the famous Blackpool Dance Festival in the UK, first held in 1920.

From his lab coat to his jodhpurs, to his Latin American outfit of black trousers with a velvet stripe down the side and a shirt with crystals that catch the light, Prof Pepper’s constantly changing attire represents his multifaceted lifestyle and successes.