KNUST-led consortium awarded €300,000 grant to develop pain relief medicine.

The project seeks to optimise a locally developed herbal pain medicine into a sustained-release tablet formulation suitable for large-scale production, creating a pathway from laboratory research to commercial pharmaceutical manufacturing.

A consortium, led by the Faculty of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi (KNUST), has secured a €300,000 grant under the PharmaVax Ghana Programme, to develop a scalable, locally manufactured herbal pain relief medicine.

The grant was announced during an award ceremony jointly hosted by the National Vaccine Institute (NVI) and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) on August 19, 2026.

The PharmaVax Ghana Programme, is funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), and the European Union (EU) to strengthen pharmaceutical research, innovation and local manufacturing in Ghana.

The KNUST is implementing the two-year project in partnership with Aspee Pharmaceuticals and the Biotechnology and Nuclear Agriculture Research Institute (BNARI) of the Ghana Atomic Energy Commission (GAEC).

 The consortium is among eight successful teams selected from 43 competitive applications, which collectively received approximately €2 million to accelerate the development of locally manufactured health products.

The project seeks to optimise a locally developed herbal pain medicine into a sustained-release tablet formulation suitable for large-scale production, creating a pathway from laboratory research to commercial pharmaceutical manufacturing.

Team member, Professor Priscilla Kolibea Mante, explained that although the herbal remedy had shown considerable promise in managing chronic pain, its wider use had been constrained by the limited availability of the medicinal plant and the impracticality of its current dosage form.

She noted that converting the extract into a sustained-release tablet would reduce the number of doses patients need to take, improving treatment adherence while making the medicine more convenient for long-term use.

She added that, the project would also address the challenge of raw material shortages by using plant tissue culture techniques to propagate the medicinal plant under controlled laboratory conditions.

According to her, researchers would develop healthy planting materials from seeds, shoot tips and leaves before comparing the chemical profiles of laboratory-grown and wild plants to ensure the authenticity, purity and quality of the final herbal product.

Speaking on the significance of the award, a member of the KNUST research team, Prof. Edmund Ekuadzi, noted that the grant builds on nearly a decade of research and innovation.

“This project builds on research we initiated with KNUST Research Fund (KReF) support of approximately GHS 20,000 in 2017.

The current funding allows us to optimize the formulation into a slow-release tablet, while addressing the challenge of sustainable cultivation of the medicinal plant through biotechnology,” he said.

Also highlighting the broader impact of the initiative, another team member, Prof. Mariam El Boakye-Gyasi said meaningful innovation was achieved when scientific research was effectively linked with industry.

She observed that, while research generates discoveries, partnerships with pharmaceutical manufacturers enable those discoveries to be transformed into medicines that benefited patients.

Beyond improving access to quality healthcare, she noted that commercializing such innovations had the potential to stimulate local industry and create employment opportunities for young people.

Aspee Pharmaceuticals, the industry’s partner on the project, will lead the scale-up and commercial manufacturing of the herbal medicine.

The company will apply its pharmaceutical manufacturing expertise to convert the research outcomes into products that can be produced at industrial scale while meeting national regulatory and quality standards.

The PharmaVax Ghana Programme promotes strategic collaboration between academia, research institutions and industry to accelerate the development of innovative health products.

Beyond advancing scientific knowledge, the initiative aims to strengthen local manufacturing, improve access to quality medicines and enhance Ghana’s health security.

Source: GNA