Less than 2% of human genomes analysed so far have been those of Africans. Yemaachi Biotech’s Africa Cancer Atlas aims to fill the research gap

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.”