David Kafui Klutse, Chief Operating Officer of PharmaNova Limited has advocated for the need to partner Government in the production of vaccines to secure the challenges that surround vaccine production in Ghana.
David Kafui further added that the next five years for the pharmaceutical industry in Ghana are going to be quite exciting.
“One of the things that as a country we want to do is that the country wants to go into vaccine production. This is probably the very highest end of the pharma manufacturing,” he stated.
“Also the national vaccine bill, which was approved in parliament or passed in parliament, with our sister company Atlantic Life Sciences, which is one of the companies named in the bill, and we have started producing vaccines and serum products. So in the next five years, it’s going to be very exciting in the country. We will come out with these new products,” he emphasised.
Speaking in an interview with the media David Kafui Klutse, Chief Operating Officer of the pharmaceutical company indicated:
“In this line of business there is a need for collaboration, which is the best way to do because sometimes in Africa the purchasing power is not as high as in Europe, and because of that some of the medications, “you cannot invest a lot of research and development to develop your own products,” he stated on 16th October 2024 in Accra.
“Again, as a result of that, the only way one can get a lot of technology to this part of the world is to go to a partnership with people who have done it, “who have got international recognition, have got WHO approval, then you partner with them, you come down here and you also do it here, then you also learn from it and then expand,” he advised.
Further in the inhalation anesthesia which is used for surgeries, the company has partnered with a US company, “So we are doing the local production here in Ghana; we have got the rights to produce here in Ghana; we have on the vaccine front, we have also partnered with about three companies to do the vaccine fill.”
“In Ghana, the anti-snake “that I mentioned to you, also we have partnered with a company in India who is helping us with the technology so that we can do,” he added.
He further added that the anti-snake has been done, and the production and the product is now with the Ghana FDA for registration. “We are hoping this year, we are hoping that from next year, at some point in the first quarter, second quarter, depending on when the FDA gets back to us and is approved, we will start the commercial production. This product for those of our brothers and sisters who do a lot of farm jobs in the north is very important, and I have got a lot of doctor friends, pharmacist friends who call me whenever this product runs out and say, Do you have any products? We need this product; we have got snake bite cases here,” he revealed.
Also, there are a lot of partnerships, and the company also has other international collaborations.
“We have got one in Indonesia, we have got several in India, all of it that we are working to expand to international collaborations to be able to produce here in Ghana so that we can challenge the industry to produce more unique things that have not been done in Ghana before. So that’s the strategy. The COVID taught us several lessons,” he disclosed.
“One of the key things that we learned, all of a sudden, there were about four products that were in our product portfolio that were mentioned as some of the products that were required, like Zinc. Zinc was one of the products, and Vitamin C was one of the products that was required. Vitamin C was one of the products.”
Touching on challenges, he acknowledged that there are marketing challenges indicating that some of these new products have been done but are not used to being done in Africa. “So how, and then you don’t have the economies of scale because you are doing very small quantities for now, but you’re not able to still compete with the giants who are doing billions in India,” he noted.
He continued that there are marketing challenges, there are production challenges, and there are internal challenges, stating that in Ghana, energy costs keep rising almost every three months. “Challenges on energy costs, cost of water, transportation, just the general cost of doing business in Ghana has of late been a bit of a challenge because we are not able to plan. So, oh, that’s quite a good question,” he stated.
Also, the environment is a legacy that has been given to Ghanaians to use it to develop and help mankind or improve mankind. And then we also have to leave it better, not in a worse shape than we took it for.
At the PharmaNova Group and Atlantic, we’ve got solar panels, So about 60% of the power that we use comes from solar panels, right? So that is a renewable source of energy. So we are not damaging; we are not taking too much from our natural resources.”
“We also have a rainwater harvesting system. You know, we produce a lot of infusions. Infusion is all about water, but the rainwater—we call it raw water,” he revealed.