Genomics · Cancer research in Africa
Yemaachi Biotechnology
An Accra company building a cancer genomic database drawn from African patients, with Roche as its anchor pharma partner. The sequencers are installed and the first cohort is enrolled. The findings are not published yet.
The machine that arrived too late for his father
In a laboratory in Accra, a whole genome sequencer works through cancer samples collected thousands of miles away. Forbes Africa described the scene in February 2026: a machine that did not exist in Ghana when Yaw Bediako’s father, Kwame, a Ghanaian academic, died of liver cancer nearly two decades earlier. Bediako told the magazine that sequencing was ongoing and that the company had recruited over 300 people the previous year.
Bediako went looking for what was known about cancer in African populations and found very little.
“I realised that cancer is this huge disease in Africa that doesn’t really get much research attention,” he told The Guardian in March 2025.
Two percent of the evidence
The gap is measurable. Less than 2 percent of human genomes analysed so far have been African, although the continent holds 17 percent of the world’s population and its most diverse genomes. The figure appears both in The Guardian and in Yemaachi’s launch release.
It has clinical consequences. Drug targets are found by analysing tumour genomes, and the tumour genomes on file are overwhelmingly European. Citing the World Health Organization, Forbes Africa reported roughly 1.1 million new cancer cases and about 700,000 deaths a year in Africa, with deaths projected to approach a million a year by 2030. For children the gap is wider: survival in low and middle income countries sits near 30 percent against 80 percent in wealthier ones.
Four founders and a name in three languages
Bediako earned his PhD at Northwestern, did postdoctoral work at the KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Programme in Kenya and at the Francis Crick Institute in London, and took a faculty post at the University of Ghana in 2019. Then the funding broke. He had won a Royal Society fellowship; as pandemic budgets were cut, Forbes Africa reported that roughly 70 percent of the fellowship funding for grantees like him vanished. His conclusion, as he told Oxford Nanopore in 2025, was that the private sector would have to carry the work.
He co-founded Yemaachi in June 2020 with David Hutchful, a software developer formerly at Microsoft Research and the Grameen Foundation; Joyce Ngoi, who led the team that sequenced the first SARS-CoV-2 isolates in Ghana; and Yaw Attua-Afari, an investor from private equity and investment banking. The name draws on three Ghanaian languages, Frafra, Ewe and Twi, and the company glosses it as a new dawn for health knowledge.
From a YC batch to an atlas
Yemaachi was one of fifteen African companies in Y Combinator’s Summer 2021 batch. In October 2021 it launched the AMBER study with the liquid biopsy firm Lucence at Cape Coast Teaching Hospital. In March 2022 it closed a $3 million seed round. In November 2023, at AORTIC in Dakar, it presented whole exome results from 106 Ghanaian breast tumours and announced AfriCAN, a clinical network it said spanned 24 institutions in nine countries.
In March 2024 Bediako joined Team SAMBAI, led by Melissa B. Davis of Morehouse School of Medicine, which won a Cancer Grand Challenges award of up to $25 million across fourteen institutions. In February 2025 came The African Cancer Atlas, or TACA, with Roche as anchor partner. In July 2025 an Illumina NovaSeq X Plus was installed in Accra, reported as the first in the country.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| TACA as announced | Feb 18, 2025: data from up to 7,500 African cancer patients, yielding up to 15,000 tumour and paired normal genomes. Roche named anchor partner, giving funding and technical support. Amount not disclosed. | Company release |
| TACA as reported | A 2026 ASCO abstract from the company reports 236 participants recruited across Ghana, Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya and the Seychelles since July 2025. Forbes Africa reported in February 2026 that the initial phase targets 3,000 genomes, not 15,000. Of the 236: 97.9% female, mean age 50.8 years, triple-negative disease in 38.1% of tumours. | Figures differ |
| Earlier sequencing work | AORTIC 2023: whole exome sequencing of 106 Ghanaian breast tumours, pathogenic or likely pathogenic variants in TP53, PIK3CA, BRCA1, NF1 and BRCA2 in 86% (81/94), plus a novel BRCA1 p.E1046* variant at 75% variant allele frequency. ASCO 2023: 20 patients, all 20 liquid biopsy samples usable against 6 of 20 tissue samples passing QC. | Published abstracts |
| Peer reviewed papers | PubMed on Sep 24, 2026 returns Bediako as co-author on a 2021 BMJ Global Health analysis of African children’s exclusion from cancer trials and a 2026 Pediatric Blood and Cancer readiness assessment at two Ghanaian childhood cancer centres. No indexed paper reporting TACA results. | Public record |
| Ethics and consent, as described | The 2026 abstract lists review board approvals, memoranda of understanding, material transfer agreements and community engagement through AfriCAN, with “informed consent supported by site-based education on genomics research.” It names “prolonged IRB approval timelines related to limited familiarity with cancer genomics” as a barrier. | Company-stated |
| The published standard | The H3Africa framework, set out by Yakubu and colleagues in 2018 and by Tindana and colleagues in 2019, gives four principles and ten elements, among them African intellectual leadership, consent, community engagement, ethics review, benefit sharing and export of samples. One principle is that research should “be designed primarily to benefit the African people, while acknowledged it may equally benefit the global population.” | Published framework |
| Outside check on consent terms | No published audit or independent analysis of the company’s consent documents, benefit sharing terms or data access agreements was found as of Sep 24, 2026. | Not found |
| Instruments | Illumina NovaSeq X Plus installed July 2025, reported as a first for Ghana. Oxford Nanopore says Yemaachi is the first institution in Ghana with a PromethION 2 Solo. A December 2025 vendor release describes a 3.2 petabyte on-premise platform under local control. | Independent and vendor |
| Regulatory and funding records | No FDA 510(k) or PMA, no ClinicalTrials.gov registration, no NIH or NSF award and no SEC Form D under the company name as of Sep 24, 2026. | Public record |
Read plainly: the infrastructure is verifiable, the cohort is small against the announced target, and the science so far exists as conference abstracts rather than peer reviewed papers. The governance question is the one to hold in view. The company has published its enrolment procedure and named its own bottlenecks, and The Guardian quoted its operations director saying the benefit question is unsettled. What does not yet exist in public is the document trail that would let an outsider check the terms against the H3Africa standard.
What to watch
- Enrolment against the announced 7,500. The distance between 236 and that headline is the most informative number here.
- A peer reviewed TACA paper. Abstracts are not results.
- A second pharma partner. The consortium opened to others in February 2025 and none has been named.
- The Series A, which Forbes Africa reported in February 2026 was being prepared.
In their words
“The field of human ancestry is rife with racism and with discrimination”
Yaw Bediako, co-founder and CEO, The Guardian, 2025 · Independent
“We are aware that the African genome is not as well-studied as the European one”
Dr Patrick Kafui Akakpo, pathologist, University of Cape Coast teaching hospital, The Guardian, 2025 · Independent
“The participants are vulnerable because they have an illness we are interested in and many are vulnerable economically. It’s still early days but we make it clear we are looking to find a way to have this community benefit from the research coming out.”
Aida Manu, director of operations, The Guardian, 2025 · Independent
“We call it the Africa tax, or the black tax”
David Hutchful, co-founder and CTO, on foreign investors, The Guardian, 2025 · Independent
“So, the women in rural Ghana with breast cancer or rural Kenya. You know, those are the people that Yemaachi really is responsible to above all else.”
Yaw Bediako, Oxford Nanopore interview, 2025 · Supplier interview
“We are actively engaged in discussions with a number of pharma companies in connection with joining the consortium and are working closely with Roche on this”
Yaw Bediako to GenomeWeb, February 2025 · Independent
“The African Cancer Atlas is not just about filling a data gap; it is about creating a model for inclusive and equitable research”
Yaw Bediako, TACA launch release, February 2025 · Company release
Related companies
Sources
- Public recordPubMed, FDA, ClinicalTrials.gov, NIH RePORTER, NSF and SEC EDGAR searches
- Published frameworkYakubu and colleagues, Model framework for governance of genomic research and biobanking in Africa
- Published frameworkTindana and colleagues, the H3Africa ethics and governance model
- IndependentThe field of human ancestry is rife with racism
- IndependentYemaachi, Roche launch African Cancer Atlas initiative
- IndependentBiotech bravado: what this entrepreneur is pioneering in Africa
- IndependentGhanaian diagnostics startup Yemaachi raises $3m seed round
- IndependentCancer research firm Yemaachi raises $3M in seed funding
- IndependentGhana’s Yemaachi Biotech selected for Y Combinator S21 batch
- IndependentYemaachi Biotech, Illumina unveil NovaSeq X Plus in Ghana
- IndependentYemaachi Biotech and team SAMBAI secure $25 million award
- Supplier interviewBuilding biotechnology in Africa, an interview with Yaw Bediako
- CompanyYemaachi launches The African Cancer Atlas, in partnership with Roche
- CompanyEarly lessons from implementation of a pan-African clinico-genomic cancer platform
- CompanyBRECXOME, whole exome sequencing of breast tumours from Ghanaian women
- CompanyLiquid biopsy for actionable mutations in Ghanaian women
- CompanyYemaachi company page
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
