George Kwaw Ainooson

Faculty Biography

George Ainooson is an Associate Professor at the Department of Pharmacology, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi, Ghana.He completed his Bachelor of Pharmacy (BPharm) and Master of Philosophy (MPhil. Pharmacology) degrees in the Faculty of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences (FPPS), KNUST, in 2003 and 2007 respectively, and a PhD in Molecular Biology from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Karlsruhe, Germany.He started his teaching and research career in 2007 as a lecturer in the Department of Pharmacology, KNUST, in natural product pharmacology, with a keen interest in inflammatory disorders. He served in this position for 5 years before his promotion to the rank of of a Senior Lecturer in 2013 and subsequent award of a DAAD scholarship in the same year for a PhD in Molecular Biology at the Institute of Toxicology and Genetics (ITG), now the Institute of Biological and Chemical Systems (IBCS) in the KIT.His PhD thesis titled 'Pest-Domain-Enriched Tyrosine Phosphatase and Glucocorticoids as Regulators of Mast Cell Signalling', sought to employ transcriptomics to deepen our understanding of the  molecular mechanisms responsible for the beneficial and toxic effects of glucocorticoids, to facilitate the design of newer drugs with equipotent anti-inflammatory effect as glucocorticoids, but minimal toxic effects.Having trained in a steroid hormone lab that specialises in the molecular endocrinology of the steroid hormone pathway in anaphylaxis and hormone-dependent malignancy (prostate and breast cancer) at KIT and as a postdoctoral research fellow in Cancer Immunology at the Center for Medical Innovation, Nagasaki University, his current research work covers the use of rodent, zebrafish and cell-based models in elucidating the mechanism of natural products in inflammatory disorders and steroid hormone-dependent malignancies such as prostate cancer. Through his research work and headship period at the Department of Pharmacology, KNUST, he secured support from the GIZ and  his alma mater KIT, to run molecular pharmacology and zebrafish labs at the KNUST.