Member Profile: Prof George Acquaah-Mensah

Member Profile: Prof George Acquaah-Mensah

Prof George Acquaah-Mensah
Prof George Acquaah-Mensah

George Acquaah-Mensah is a Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences. He has served on that Faculty since the start of 2005. He received his Ph.D. in Pharmacology /Toxicology from the University of Texas at Austin.

Afterwards, Dr. Acquaah-Mensah joined the Department of Pharmacology, University of Colorado School of Medicine as a Post-doc. There his research interests continued in Computational Pharmacology (Bio-Ontologies and Machine Learning) and neurotoxicology under the mentorship of Dr. Larry E. Hunter. 

Professor George Acquaah-Mensah is a member of the Society of Toxicology, the International Society for Computational Biology, and was the founding President of the Convention for Bio-Medical Research, Ghana in 2008. He has since remained a committed member and continues to serve the organization in various capacities.

He had his humble beginnings in Ghana. He was born in Tema, then a small town on the Greenwich Meridian. There, he attended two public schools: the Mante-Din Drive Primary School in Community One, and later on the then nascent Star Primary School in Community Five. For seven years he was a student at his alma mater, Mfantsipim School, Cape Coast. Subsequently, he became a student at the Faculty of Pharmacy at the University of Science and Technology in Kumasi.

He describes his journey into Pharmacy as the result of a drifting. However, having drifted there, he grew deep roots in the field, and currently holds professional registrations/licensure including in Ghana, Canada, and the US states of Texas, Colorado, and Massachusetts.  He, nonetheless, has his focus on his career in academia.

He currently teaches Pharmacokinetics/ Biopharmaceutics, and Pharmacogenomics mainly. His publications over the last three years have been listed at the end of this profile. His current research focus is related to transcriptional-regulatory and signaling networks in a variety of models of disease, including breast cancer, pancreatic cancer and addiction.

The story of our lives is fraught with challenges. Indeed, this profile would be a lot longer if he were to itemize the challenges he encountered along the way. He encourages the youth to be focused, be disciplined and persevere. We should never let setbacks and rejections demoralize us.

Recent Publications:

Aguilar, B, Abdilleh, K, Acquaah-Mensah, GK. Multi-omics inference of differential breast cancer-related transcriptional regulatory network gene hubs between young Black and White patients. Cancer Genetics https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cancergen.2022.11.001 (2022).

Lynn, JR, Park, M, Ogunwale, C, Acquaah-Mensah, GK. A Tale of Two Diseases: Exploring Mechanisms Linking Diabetes Mellitus with Alzheimer’s Disease. J Alzheimers Dis. doi: 10.3233/JAD-210612 85(2):485-501 (2022).

Singh A, Daemen A, Jeon S-M, Foreman O, Sudini K, Gnad F, Lajoie S, Gour N, Mitzner W, Chatterjee S, Choi E-J, Ravishankar B, Rappaport A, Patil NS, McCleland M, Johnson L, Acquaah-Mensah GK, Gabrielson E, Biswal S, Hatzivassiliou G. NRF2 activation promotes aggressive lung cancer and associates with poor clinical outcomes. Clin Cancer Res. doi: 10.1158/1078-0432.CCR-20-1985 (2021).

Adabor ES, Acquaah-Mensah, GK. DOKI: domain knowledge-driven inference method for reverse-engineering transcriptional regulatory relationships among genes in cancer. Computers in Biology and Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compbiomed.2020.104017 (2020).

Chen X, Acquaah-Mensah GK, Denning K, Peterson J, Wang K, Denvir J, Hong F, Cederbaum A, Lu Y. High fat diet induces fibrosis in mice lacking CYP2A5 and PPARα: A new model for steatohepatitis-associated fibrosis. American Journal of Physiology-Gastrointestinal and Liver Physiology. doi: 10.1152/ajpgi.00213.2020 (2020).

Adabor ES, Acquaah-Mensah, GK. MSclassifier: median-supplement model-based classification tool for automated knowledge discovery. F1000 Research. DOI: 10.12688/f1000research.25501.1 (2020).

Andey, T, Attah, MM, Akwaaba-Reynolds, NA, Cheema, S, Parvin-Nejad, S, Acquaah-Mensah, GK. Enhanced Immortalization, HUWE1 mutations and other Biological Drivers of Breast Invasive Carcinoma in Black/African American Patients. Gene: X Volume 5:100030 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gene.2020.100030 (2020).