At the laboratory of a genomics research company headquartered in Ghana’s capital Accra, the low, steady whir of a whole-genome sequencer, calibrated to read the most intimate instructions of human life, is helping process cancer samples collected thousands of miles away, from across Africa.
“Sequencing is ongoing… We recruited over 300 people last year. So, we are on course,’’ Dr Yaw Bediako, Co-founder and CEO of Yemaachi Biotech, says to FORBES AFRICA in a virtual conversation, seated in his office in Accra.
“We are a small startup. We are always looking for additional funding. I don’t even think some of the big companies will ever tell you that they have everything they need,” says Bediako.
For many researchers, the loss would have been paralyzing. For Bediako, it became clarifying.
If the systems he relied on could disappear overnight, then building something durable, something rooted in Africa, was no longer optional.
In 2020, he co-founded Yemaachi Biotech with David Hutchful, Joyce Ngoi, and Yaw Attua-Afari. The name Yemaachi is a portmanteau drawn from three Ghanaian languages, loosely translating to “a new dawn for health in Africa”. It is a phrase that sounds aspirational, until one grapples with the scale of the problem the company set out to address.
Globally, nearly 80% of genomic data used in cancer research comes from people of European ancestry. “If we are thinking about cancer data, I’m sure it’s even less than 2% of cancer genomes that are from Africa,’’ says Bediako.
The imbalance has consequences that are both immediate and deadly: drugs that work less well, diagnoses that come too late, and survival rates that lag dramatically behind those in high-income countries.
In 2023, the World Health Organization (WHO) said Africa records approximately 1.1 million new cancer cases each year, with about 700,000 deaths. Without urgent intervention, that figure is expected to approach one million deaths annually by 2030.
For children, the disparities are even starker. An estimated 85% of pediatric cancers occur in low- and middle-income countries, where survival rates hover around 30%, compared with 80% in wealthier nations.
Yemaachi Biotech’s core insight is simple on the surface: before Africa could benefit from precision medicine, it needed to be visible through sufficient genomics research.
The company’s most ambitious project, The African Cancer Atlas—known as TACA—aims to sequence 15,000 cancer genomes from 7,500 African patients across the continent. It is a scale of genomic work that has never before been attempted in Africa.
According to Bediako, the initial phase targets 3,000 genomes, in partnership with Roche, the Swiss pharmaceutical giant, which serves as the project’s anchor partner.
Lisa Rooney Slater, Head of Roche’s African Genomics Program, described the partnership as a step toward equitable collaboration. “By partnering with Yemaachi, we hope to leverage Africa’s genomic diversity to accelerate healthcare for cancer patients in Africa and beyond,” Slater was quoted to have said when the initiative launched.
Patients are being enrolled in Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, and the Seychelles, with plans to expand further. The work is executed through a consortium of more than 25 hospitals and research institutions across nine countries—many of them leading cancer treatment centers.
Each sample is paired with detailed clinical data, creating a resource that pharmaceutical companies and academic researchers can use to identify new drug targets and understand how existing therapies perform in genetically diverse populations.
“The thing about African data is African data is not just useful for African people. African data is useful for all people because our species evolved from this continent. So, Africa has more genetic diversity than any other part of the world. And really everybody else’s genomic diversity can be traced back to the continent,” says Bediako.
According to him, variants associated with European, Asian, and Latin American populations can all be found within African populations—often alongside variants that exist nowhere else. For drug discovery, that diversity is significant.
It will take more than just Yemaachi Biotech. We hope that we will be the beginning of almost a revolution, right? Almost the beginning of a wave of biotech companies that would come into the continent to drive this industry forward for our continent. If we can achieve that, then we will make the health of people in Africa better, but we’ll also make the health of people all over the world better, thanks to the discoveries that we make.
Read the full article: Forbes Africa