Yemaachi Biotech

When Yaw Bediako lost his father to liver cancer, it set the Ghanaian immunologist on a journey to know more about the disease. He quickly realised the burden of cancer in Africa was much greater than he had thought – accounting for about 700,000 deaths every year – and that very few scientific papers about the disease on the continent were available.

“I realised that cancer is this huge disease in Africa that doesn’t really get much research attention,” he says. “But it’s not just an African problem, it’s global … It stands out as a problem that does not distinguish between geographies or socioeconomic class.”

Fifteen years after his father’s death, Bediako is leading Yemaachi Biotech, a company he co-founded in 2020 in Ghana’s capital, Accra, dedicated to building the largest, and possibly the first, database of genetic and clinical information in Africa from up to 7,500 cancer patients.

Read the full article here: The Guardian