By Edward Acquah, GNA
Accra, Oct. 3, GNA – Professor George Obeng Adjei, an Associate Professor of Clinical Pharmacology, University of Ghana, has called for a national precision medicine network to improve healthcare delivery in Ghana.
He said the network should connect existing health, research and data systems rather than create new infrastructure, enabling clinicians and researchers to use patients’ information to make treatment safer and more effective.
Precision medicine is an approach to healthcare that considers an individual’s genetic makeup, health history, lifestyle and environment, among other factors, to determine the prevention, diagnosis or treatment most appropriate for that person.
Prof. Adjei made the call on Thursday when he delivered the 2026 Inaugural Lecture of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, on the theme: “Precision Medicine or Evidence-Based Medicine: Addressing Multimorbidity in Ghana.”
He said Ghana needed to move beyond a healthcare system that largely relied on evidence generated from studies of groups of patients with individual diseases, particularly as multimorbidity became increasingly common.
Multimorbidity, the presence of two or more chronic conditions in the same person, was associated with poorer health outcomes, reduced quality of life, increased hospital stays and healthcare utilisation, as well as higher mortality.
He cited the WHO Study on Global Ageing and Adult Health (SAGE), which reported that 22 per cent of Ghanaian adults, aged 50 years and above, had two or more chronic conditions between 2007 and 2010.
He also cited the Research on Obesity and Diabetes among African Migrants (RODAM) study, which recorded multimorbidity among 31 per cent of rural Ghanaian men and 49 per cent of rural women, compared with 51 per cent of urban men and more than 60 per cent of urban women.
Prof. Adjei said the increasing burden of multiple diseases exposed limitations in conventional evidence-based medicine, whose clinical trials were often designed to test treatments for individual diseases in relatively homogeneous groups.
“Precision medicine asks, does the evidence available work for this patient?” he said.
He noted that Ghana already had important building blocks for precision medicine, including clinical research institutions, electronic health systems, disease registries, genomic research and pharmacogenetic studies.
However, Prof. Adjei identified limited early-stage discovery research, translational research and locally funded clinical development as gaps that needed attention.
He urged Ghana to establish secure and interoperable systems linking patients, hospitals, academic research centres, electronic health records and disease registries.
“The regulatory and security systems have to precede the network,” he said, stressing the need for strong governance, ethical safeguards and data protection.
He called for sustained financing and the development of a multidisciplinary workforce with expertise in genetics, pharmacogenomics, data science and computational research.
Prof. Adjei said such a system could help Ghana harness its population’s genetic diversity, which offered opportunities for understanding disease susceptibility and responses to medicines, particularly because Africans remained underrepresented in global genomic datasets.
He proposed a “Ghana programme”, which he described as the “Junior Big Push Agenda,” to bring together existing resources and data systems and advance precision medicine in the country.
GNA
Edited by Agnes Boye-Doe
Reporter: Edward Acquah
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