 |
$42.6 million Gates Foundation grant to produce
malaria drug
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has made a $42.6 million
five-year grant to OneWorld Health, a San Francisco pharmaceutical
institute, to support nonprofit research and development of an
affordable and accessible cure for malaria, which is responsible
for 1.5 million deaths each year.
UC Berkeley researchers will partner with OneWorld Health, founded
in 2000 as the first U.S. nonprofit pharmaceutical company, and
Amyris Biotechnologies, an east bay biotech company, to engineer
a synthetic equivalent of the compound artemisinin, currently
the most effective treatment for malaria. The goal is to reduce
manufacturing costs and create a stable and scalable supply of
affordable antimalarials for the developing world.
The breakthrough technology behind the process—part of a
pioneering field called synthetic biology—has been in development
over the last 10 years by Berkeley chemical engineering and bioengineering
professor Jay Keasling and his research team. Keasling is also
director of synthetic biology at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab
and a researcher at the California Institute for Quantitative
Biomedical Research (QB3).
“This project will use some of the latest advances in molecular
biology to engineer a microbial chemical factory and reduce the
cost of a much-needed drug tenfold,” Keasling said. “This
is a dream project: interesting science, high technology, rapid
transition from the bench to the bedside, and most important,
critical need.” The nonprofit nature of the partnership,
he added, could be a model for attacking neglected diseases in
the developing world.
Each year, between 300 and 500 million people, most of them poor,
are infected with malaria, and at least 1.5 million die, primarily
children in Africa and Asia. The disease has become increasingly
resistant to front-line medications, but artemisinin combination
drugs provide a nearly 100 percent effective treatment. At $2.40
per adult course, however, these therapies are beyond the reach
of millions of the world’s poorest people.
To reduce that cost to well under a dollar, Berkeley has issued
a royalty-free license to both OneWorld Health and Amyris to develop
technology for the malaria treatments. In exchange, Amyris will
produce the drugs at cost, and OneWorld Health will perform regulatory
work required to allow the low-cost, microbially based product
to be substituted for plant-based product by manufacturers of
combination drugs containing artemisinin.
Artemisinin is in short supply, and current production methods
are relatively expensive and labor intensive. The compound must
be extracted from the wormwood plant, a process that in some developing
countries may retain toxic impurities in the final drug product.
Berkeley will complete development of the synthetic process and
maximize production of artemisinic acid, a precursor to artemisinin,
for producing the antimalarials.
|
|
FOREFRONT takes you into the
labs, classrooms, and lives of professors, students, and alumni
for an intimate look at the innovative research, teaching, and
campus life that define the College of Engineering at the University
of California, Berkeley.
Published three times a year by the Engineering Public Affairs
Office. Have a comment about Forefront? E-mail
your letter to the editor. Click here
to learn more about the magazine. |
|
