Pharma in Ghana: A new resource for Africans.
Jan 2nd, 2005 by jimmoore
As we bemoan the lack of willingness of companies to make drugs
available in Africa, the best way to deal with the situation is to find
a hospitable nation in Africa, and use it as a base for manufacturing
and distribution. Here is a couple doing just that, in Ghana. From “Conscious Choice,” Chicago’s green resource on the web.
Healing Africa
by Mandy Burrell
While most folks their age look forward
to winding down their professional lives, a married pair of Chicago
chemists have begun what they expect will be their most impressive
life’s work — producing critically needed pharmaceutical drugs from
start to finish in Africa.
At a time when the United States refuses to join the United Nations
in making AIDS drugs available globally, and in the face of the
pharmaceutical industry’s seemingly single-minded obsession with
profit, Paul Lartey and Alexandra Graham decided that something big
needed to happen if Africa is ever to eradicate the diseases that
ravage its people. While they are acutely aware that many Africans lack
even the basics to support holistic health — things such as adequate
food and clean and regular water supplies, not to mention relative
luxuries such as nutritional supplements — the couple hopes their
brainchild, LaGray Chemical Company, will make a measurable difference
in the treatment and spread of diseases throughout Africa.
The facility that will house LaGray is currently being built in
Ghana. It is the first company of its kind on the entire African
continent and will employ a trained African labor force to manufacture
medicine to fight HIV/AIDS, malaria and hypertension, among other
illnesses. “The basic critical needs of the continent in terms of drugs
aren’t being met,” says Graham. Companies market cheap painkillers,
penicillins and vitamins to Africans, she notes. And African medical
providers receive shipments of old, off patent or “adulterated” drugs
all the time. But on a continent where three out of four adults suffers
from hypertension, medicine to fight the disease is about as difficult
to come by as a glass of uncontaminated drinking water. “We want to
make the right drugs, the critical drugs, available to the people,”
says Graham.
Set to begin production this fall, LaGray’s launch can’t come soon
enough both for the continent and for the couple. “We have reached a
point in our lives where our children are grown, so we’re at an
advantage in that we now have time to give something back,” says
Graham, who along with Lartey, was born, raised and educated in West
Africa and moved to the United States to find work. In between raising
seven children and starting one of Chicago’s first African restaurants
— Ofie, which they closed to devote all of their energies to LaGray —
the couple put in a combined 37 years experience at major
pharmaceutical companies. They conceived plans for LaGray, a company
whose name is a hybrid of theirs, years ago, but wanted to wait for the
right moment.
That moment is now. Lartey and Graham have cashed in their
retirement to pony up $1 million of the nearly $7 million they need to
get the operation on its feet. “It is a very passionate and unbridled
effort,” says Lartey. “We are sacrificing everything.”
And they are doing it with an exacting persistence befitting their
organic chemistry backgrounds, which have gotten them noticed. “They’ve
got it all: technology, tenacity and creative thinking,” says Khalid
Abdullah Tariq Al-Mansour, a widely respected expert, author and
speaker on, among other topics, Africa’s economic challenges.
Al-Mansour advises an African economic development organization called
New Partnerships for African Development. He also directs an initiative
that seeks out Africans and African-Americans who are entrepreneurially
inclined and committed to the continent. At no cost to Graham and
Lartey, Al-Mansour has thrown his full support behind LaGray, and is
rallying friends — including Fortune 500 ceos and Shaquille O’Neal — to
gift financial support to the company. “My compensation is that they
are successful. They have to be the best,” says Al-Mansour. “We can’t
afford to make too many mistakes because Africa has had enough
mistakes, especially from African-American [businesspeople].”
Lartey and Graham know they must turn impressive profits if they
want to accomplish their mission. They’ve never believed that
pharmaceutical companies should give products away, and they don’t
intend to be the first. “To say that companies should sell [a drug] for
cheap or give it away sounds nice, but to us it is very clear that is
not a sustainable solution,” says Lartey. “GM is not going to give cars
away in Africa because there is a transportation problem there.”
For one thing, the only way to fund research on new medicines is to
profit from existing ones, say Lartey and Graham. Yet, the
pharmaceutical industry as a whole has turned a blind eye toward
developing drugs for diseases that plague Africa, pegging such drugs as
less profitable. “Malaria has been around for centuries and there are
people still dying from it. There’s something wrong with that,” says
Graham. To begin remedying the situation, Graham and Lartey will use
what they save in labor costs to fund aggressive research and
development. Employing an entirely African labor force will have an
important secondary effect, says Al-Mansour. “They will reinforce in
the minds of the people and the continent the destiny of the black man
and woman,” says Al-Mansour. “The world has concluded that Africa is
dead for the next 30 or 40 years, and for that to change, we’ve got to
have success stories.”
Lartey and Graham believe “start to finish pharmaceutical
production” is just the success story Africa needs right now. “I think
we’ll swim,” says Gray. “I don’t anticipate us sinking at all.
Persistence. That’s the main thing.”
Mandy Burrell is a local writer who “loves to write stories about people who enrich her life.”
Get More Info:
Check out LaGray Chemical Company’s Web site at http://www.lagraychem.com. E-mail: info@lagraychem.com or 773-764-1573.