Omanghana
Eight collaborative research and development projects in Ghana have received €2 million in grant funding to support the local development and industrial production of medicines, vaccines and diagnostic technologies.
The funding was awarded under the PharmaVax Ghana Program during the Research Meets Manufacturing ceremony held in Accra. The event was jointly organized by the National Vaccine Institute and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für International Zusammenarbeit.
The program is co-funded by the European Union and Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development under the Team Europe Initiative on Manufacturing and Access to Vaccines, Medicines and Health Technologies in Africa.
Participating Ghanaian research institutions and pharmaceutical companies will provide an additional €425,000 in counterpart funding. This brings the total investment across the eight projects to €2.425 million.
The beneficiaries were selected from 43 proposals through a competitive process. A nine-member independent committee of Ghanaian experts evaluated the submissions based on technical feasibility, potential public health benefits and prospects for commercial expansion.
Among the beneficiaries are the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Aspee Pharmaceuticals Limited and the Ghana Atomic Energy Commission. The three institutions received €300,000, supported by €150,000 in counterpart funding, to improve a locally developed herbal formulation for pain relief.
The Centre for Plant Medicine Research, the Dodowa Health Research Centre and Atlantic Lifesciences Limited also secured a combined €340,000 for two projects. One will support clinical trials for a prostate-health treatment, while the other will focus on stability testing for snake venom antiserum manufactured in Ghana.
The West African Centre for Cell Biology of Infectious Pathogens at the University of Ghana received €300,000 to use artificial intelligence in the development and scaling of monoclonal antibodies and rapid diagnostic tools for malaria and Mpox.
The PharmaVax Ghana Program is intended to close the longstanding gap between scientific research and commercial manufacturing. It will help researchers transform laboratory discoveries into safe, scalable and regulatory-compliant health products that can be produced locally.
The initiative is also expected to strengthen collaboration between universities, research centers and pharmaceutical manufacturers. By linking scientific expertise with industrial capacity, the program aims to reduce the number of promising Ghanaian innovations that fail to progress beyond the research stage.
The investment supports Ghana’s National Vaccine Roadmap and the country’s broader ambition to become a regional center for pharmaceutical and vaccine manufacturing.
In the long term, the projects are expected to reduce Ghana’s dependence on imported medicines, vaccines and diagnostic products while improving access to essential health technologies across West Africa.
Source: Omanghana
