MU biochemistry graduate student hopes to help identify dangerous diseases in Ghana
Tawiah plans to study diagnostics and disease and bring his research back to his home country of Ghana
Kwaku Tawiah using a pipette while performing daily cell culture research in the Bond Life Sciences Center. Tawiah said he plans to study diagnostics and disease and bring his research back to his home country of Ghana. "I want to find cheaper ways of diagnosing disease," Tawiah said. " You prevent a lot of disease if you diagnose first." Photo by Whitney Matewe.
Ghana was spared the Ebola outbreak that hit West Africa in 2014, but its people are not immune to major infectious disease.
A biochemistry graduate student at MU hopes to one day open up a diagnostic center in Ghana, his home country, to help identify these diseases and move toward prevention by providing a place to get tested.
Kwaku Tawiah works with professor of biochemistry Donald Burke in a laboratory in the Bond Life Sciences Center. Tawiah spends much of his time analyzing cell cultures to find new ways to treat highly transmittable diseases and other illnesses like cancer.
He hopes eventually to take his knowledge back to Ghana to help diagnose diseases on the ground instead of shipping blood samples to other countries, which costs time and money.
“Where I come from in West Africa, we have most of the world diseases, but all the research is done (in the U.S.)," he said. "In the future, I see myself pushing some of those things back to Ghana."
Tawiah and the team in Burke's lab are developing a targeted delivery approach to treatment, a new strategy in the science world. Instead of attacking the whole body to treat cancer with chemotherapy, for example, the work could help find ways to attack only the cancerous cells.
The research, now in the early stages, focuses on RNA, which carries genetic information from the DNA to other parts of a cell. Tawiah's team uses the genetic information to better understand ways to treat diseases.
“We engineer biology to do cool new things, all the way from building mimics of the organisms that might have existed at the origin of life to combating cancer and HIV and Ebola virus,” Burke said in an interview.
RNA strands can fold themselves into three-dimensional structures that have chemical properties and can identify the type of cell they’re interacting with.
“Those (chemical) properties, for example, might have the ability to snuggle up next to some other molecule and differentiate, ‘Oh, this is a flu virus,’ ‘Oh, this is a cancer cell,' or something else or other sorts of interactions, as it does with other molecules as they bump into each other,” Burke said.
Sometimes when the molecules bump into each other, Burke said, they stick and may remain together. This means Burke, Tawiah and the rest of the team can take advantage of the "stickiness" to block certain cells from replicating and causing diseases such as cancer, HIV and Ebola.
This research could allow physicians to see where tumors are located and potentially stop the replication process of cancer cells to impede the spread of the disease, Burke said.
As part of the team, Tawiah hopes the work will prove valuable when he returns to Ghana. He said his father, Jones Tawiah, is his inspiration. Raised in a small village in Ghana, his father was the only boy among seven children. Education for girls was not encouraged, so he was the only one to attend school.
Now with seven children of his own, Tawiah's father worked to make sure his children had every opportunity to learn. He served as the district chief executive for the government in Ghana, a job similar to a city mayor in the United States. Now that his children are grown, he runs a farm with livestock, mangoes and yams.
Kwaku Tawiah, the first boy in his family, remembers his father pampering him as a child so he could succeed him and become head of the family. In a telephone interview, his mother, Alice Wiredu, said her son was always her helper. She said he would follow her during the day to help solve problems around the house.
Kwaku Tawiah said his parents had a direct influence on both his education and career choices. In Ghana, parents choose a track for their children, and his put him in a science-specific track.
“In our culture, your parents shape what you want to do, and they choose for you,” Kwaku Tawiah said. “They saw all my strengths and my weaknesses, so they directed me to science in high school.”
He began studying agriculture science in high school, but his plans changed when a family friend told him about a scholarship to study in the U.S. He applied for the International Doorway Academic Scholarship Program and started his journey to the United States.
He spent his undergraduate years at Lindenwood University in St. Charles in 2009. That's when he fell in love with research.
“When I got here, I realized the vast opportunities to study,” Tawiah said. “When you think about science, the only thing I could think of was becoming a doctor. But then I started doing research, and I was like, ‘Oh wow, there’s a whole other world out there.'”
After finishing his undergraduate degree, Tawiah decided to study at MU. Graduate students in biochemistry work for 10 weeks in three different labs before they settle on one they would like to join. Tawiah chose Burke’s lab after spending time in a lab that studies viruses and another that studies plants.
Traveling from Ghana to Missouri was an adventure, he said. He had never before left his home country, which has a mild tropical climate.
“Everything was different — the food, the weather. I had this conception in my mind that it was going to be cold, but I got here in St. Louis in August," Tawiah said with a laugh. "Closest thing to hell."
When he isn’t in the lab, Tawiah is typically at Stankowski Field playing soccer or watching a game on TV at home. On Sundays, he prepares traditional Ghanaian dishes like jolloff, which, Tawiah said, is like jambalaya.
Food is just one way he stays in touch with his roots. He also talks to his laboratory colleagues about his aspirations to go back to Ghana and help his country.
He said he's motivated by the unanswered questions of the universe and works to find not only better treatments for diseases but also to find what is the root cause of them.
“I think the most intriguing part is getting to the molecular level,” Tawiah said. “We know diseases are dangerous, but it’s intriguing for me to know exactly how this is happening. I think that’s what keeps me going. It drives me to find answers.”
Supervising editors are Jeanne Abbott and Sara Shipley Hiles. Article and photo reproduced with permission from the Columbia Missourian.