About Selorm Avumegah

Dr Michael Selorm Avumegah is a global health strategist, vaccinologist and the Founder and CEO of Aniwa Health Intelligence, the enterprise built on the DiseaseChaser practice and dedicated to advancing scientific sovereignty, outbreak preparedness and equitable health innovation across Africa and the Global South.

His scientific grounding began in Ghana, where he led community-based public health outreach on sexually transmitted and neglected tropical diseases while completing a biology degree at KNUST in Kumasi — an experience that continues to inform his conviction that lasting health security must be built from the ground up, not imposed from the outside. A scholarship took him to Aarhus University in Denmark, then to Deakin University in Australia for doctoral research on Buruli ulcer, a disease still dismissed as witchcraft in parts of Ghana: an epidemiological update of cases in Victoria and a pilot serological screening test for community exposure, later formalised into a systematic review and meta-analysis of the field's diagnostic evidence.

At the University of Queensland, his preclinical work on the molecular clamp vaccine platform contributed to a SARS-CoV-2 candidate that advanced to a phase 1 clinical trial and underpinned a technology later spun out as Vicebio, acquired by Sanofi in 2025 in a deal worth up to US$1.6 billion. He has since carried that same instinct for tracking outbreaks to their source into technical work on vaccine reference standards and biospecimen access for organisations including the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, across pathogens from Nipah virus to mpox and Marburg.

It is this record — laboratory and field, Ghana to Denmark to Australia to the UK — that gave rise to DiseaseChaser. Selorm founded it to challenge the systems and assumptions that leave low- and middle-income countries perpetually reactive to health emergencies rather than structurally prepared for them, and to put hard-won technical expertise to independent use for the ministries, funders and communities carrying that burden. He is also a committed mentor to early-career scientists across Africa, Europe and Australia through MeetMentors.