The South African National Bioinformatics Institute delivers biomedical discovery appropriate to both international and African context. Researchers at SANBI perform the highest level of research and provide excellence in education. SANBI was founded in 1996 by Winston Hide, a South African computational biologist who returned from the USA. The Institute has been developed
within the University of the Western Cape faculty of Natural Sciences. It is legally part of the UWC. It has a constitution that has been ratified by the Senate of the University. SANBI was founded with funding from the National Research Foundation as a result of the vision of the head of the FRD, Dr. Khotso Mokhele, and had externally funded research from Glaxo and the United States Department of Energy totalling $95 000. The first South African funding that came from outside of the NRF was as a result of a grant from the South African Telecommunications companies Telkom and later Thintana. In 2000 SANBI submitted a successful proposal for Unit funding from the SA Medical Research Council and established Africa’s first UWC/SANBI Bioinformatics capacity development unit.
