Artemisinin – Anti-malarial Therapeutic
Malaria is a preventable, curable disease that claims the lives of more than a million people a year. In Africa alone, malaria causes 20% of all childhood deaths, killing 2,000 children every day. In addition to its debilitating impact on the health of populations in developing countries, malaria has also been shown to be a major constraint to economic development. Economists believe that malaria is responsible for a ‘growth penalty' of up to 1.3% per year in some African countries. (Roll Back Malaria - WHO) When compounded over the years, this penalty leads to substantial differences in GDP between countries with and without malaria and severely restrains the economic growth of the entire region. We first developed and applied our technology to create microbial strains that produce artemisinic acid, a precursor of artemisinin, a highly effective anti-malarial therapeutic. This work was funded by a five year grant awarded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to the Institute for OneWorld Health.
Malaria patients can be treated with highly effective Artemisinin-based Combination Therapies (ACTs), but cultivating and extracting artemisinin, which comes from the Chinese Sweet Wormwood plant, is expensive and time consuming. Lack of access to this vital compound prevents millions of people in the developing world from receiving critical ACTs. Amyris has granted a royalty-free license for this technology to sanofi-aventis for the manufacture and commercialization of artemisinin-based drugs with a goal of market availability by 2013. Once commercial scale production is reached, artemisinin will be available to other ACT manufacturers and will:
•Diversify sources of high-quality artemisinin
•Lower the cost of artemisinin production, including the price of ACTs, making them more accessible to those who need them most
•Speed artemisinin to market to more reliably meet rising demand
•Prevent shortage-driven price rises common to plant-based commodities
In 2011, Amyris’s co-founders established a non-profit organization, Zagaya, to ensure access to affordable malaria treatments in the developing world. Zagaya means ‘spear’ in several languages and reflects our vision of being a warrior in the battle against malaria, equipping the world with tools to eradicate this insidious disease. sanofi-aventis will be the first company to produce ACTs using semi-synthetic artemisinin developed from Amyris technology. However, their capacity will not fill the need and zagaya will step in to fill the gap by providing artemisinic acid for use in manufacturing ACTs to ensure no lives will be lost from a lack of treatments.
Over the longer term, zagaya is committed to ensuring ACTs remain affordable to all by partnering with multiple manufacturers to reduce other costs of ACTs; co-drugs and formulation thereof, excipients as well as fill and finish costs. Our goal for ACTs is 300 million cures at 50 cents a treatment.
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