Over 18000 lives are lost to cancer every year according to the global cancer statistics. Breast and prostate cancers are the most prevalent.

In recent times, liver and cervical cancers seem to be rising rapidly.

Conscious efforts have been made to offer a glimmer of hope patients suffering from the disease but challenges persist.

High cost of treatment and limited availability of advanced diagnostic tools have worsened the burden for many patients in Ghana.

It is against this backdrop that the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research sought advanced options to resolve this dilemma.

Now cancer patients can breathe a sigh of relief as the institute introduces a cutting-edge diagnostic machine to enhance advanced cancer diagnosis in Ghana, a chance to lessen their worries.

The Director of the institute, Prof Dorothy Yeboah-Manu on the sidelines with JoyNews disclosed plethora of advantages that comes with the machine.

“We have commissioned a new device that we have acquired, BD. BD is the manufacturer and S8 the flow cytometry. What this equipment does is that it allows you to study human cells at a single cell level.”

“And this is very crucial in a lot of areas of science. In disease conditions, some of these cells change. A key one is cancer. So this new machine will be able to study cancer cells and other human cells, how they behave along disease conditions. The good news is that this machine that we have is the most advanced and is the only one in Africa and the Middle East.

“For us as a research institute, this also very crucial because this will help us to do in-depth studies for us to understand different disease conditions, such as infectious diseases, such as cancer. In addition, it will also help us advance, for example in drug discovery.

"We want to understand how, when people take the medication like cytotoxicity analysis, this is very important. And because we have a cell sorter, we can now even separate individual cells and look at how, what we call the gene expression, how the bodies, the genes, how our genes are responding and what are the different mechanisms that mechanistic factors that they are expressing.”

To consolidate its vision, the institute also launched a molecular biology suite to house its equipment. Prof Yeboah-Manu explained that the suite will allow them to perform at the optimal level set in international best practices.

“One of the key things that in advanced research environments like this is to build modern technologies as a core facility. When we say core, it means that this facility is for the institute and I’m excited that we had budgetary allocation by the government of Ghana.

“With the work that we did, we had only one molecular biology suite, and therefore we approached the government that we would need to expand and renovate our facilities and this was approved.”

This is part of the broader vision by government to improve healthcare in the country while providing relief for cancer survivors.