The compound, isolated and characterised by Professor E. A. Sofowora and colleagues at the University of Ibadan College of Medicine, was 2-hydroxymethyl benzoic acid, derived from the root bark of *Fagara zanthoxyloides* (locally *orin-ata*, the 'pepper chewing-stick'). Sickle-cell patients in southern Nigeria had used the bark for generations as a chewing-stick and for the relief of generalised body pains — a use Sofowora's team treated, properly, as a clinical observation worth chasing.
In vitro the isolated compound inhibited sickling of homozygous SS erythrocytes at concentrations achievable in plasma. The 1975 *Lancet* paper91557-9) reported the activity; a 1976 *Nature* paper reported the mechanism (preferential binding to deoxy-haemoglobin S). Both were single-institution, Nigerian-led submissions accepted on merit.
What did not follow was a clinical trial programme. The country had no pharmaceutical company willing to take a plant-derived compound through Phase I in the late 1970s — the National Council of Arts and Culture's traditional-medicine policy was a decade away, NIPRD did not yet exist (it was founded in 1989), and the universities had no GMP pilot plant. The compound is still cited as a reference standard in sickle-cell pharmacology forty years later; no Fagara drug ever reached a pharmacy shelf.
It is the first entry in the catalogue not because it failed, but because it set the pattern: Nigerian laboratory, internationally validated science, no downstream institution to carry it across the gap to a product. Niprisan, twenty-three years later, would clear that gap — and then fall into the next one.