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.”