Yaa Asantewaa Osei

Yaa Asantewaa Osei, Ph.D. is a registered Pharmacist and a lecturer at the Department of Pharmaceutics at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana. She is an early career scientist who is highly motivated to pursue an academic and translational research career. She believes in research that translates into an impact on the lives of people. She has a broad background in Pharmacy with Pharmaceutics as the major and with specific training and expertise in formulation and drug delivery systems development.  She specializes in formulation development (conventional and advanced), excipient development, and pharmacovigilance (post-market surveillance activities). Her desire to see a lot of research uptake has led to the finding of alternative cheaper locally sourced raw materials for their pharmaceutical industries. Through her excipient development projects, the documentation of the effectiveness of local gums and starches as pharmaceutical excipients has been successful. These studies emphasized the possibility of sourcing local pharmaceutical excipients and their great performance in different pharmaceutical industrial usages. More of such projects are ongoing as collaborative work with Crop Research Institute. She also specializes in advanced drug delivery systems formulation with her focus on nanoparticulate drug delivery. Her research in that area has attempted to encapsulate insulin in glucose-responsive polymeric nanoparticles for the management of diabetes. The developed particles showed potential, but more work needs to be done. Collectively, these results and more of such work done have the capacity to fundamentally change the way insulin is delivered to patients and that can improve their quality of life. She is currently exploring the potential of various locally sourced solid lipids as advanced drug delivery vehicles for solid lipid nanoparticulate drug delivery. In addition, she has successfully collaborated with other colleagues, researchers, and facilities and produced peer-reviewed publications. Dr. Osei has extensive experience with formulation design and development and she currently heads the production unit of the Faculty of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at her University In addition, she also focuses on mentoring young females, focusing on helping them to develop an interest in science and especially research.