Malaria Fight

PHILANTHROPY

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded $42.6 million to the Institute for OneWorld Health, a nonprofit pharmaceutical company, to fund malaria drug research.

The institute's goal is to develop a microbially derived version of the drug artemisinin in five years. "It is a relay race right now," says Katherine Woo, director of scientific affairs at OneWorld Health.

The evergreen plant Artemisia annua harbors artemisinin, a natural antimalarial, but efforts to farm the plant and extract the compound have proven difficult. Novartis has been providing an artemisinin-based combination therapy at cost, but the company informed the World Health Organization in November of insufficient supply of a key ingredient, artemether.

Enter the new field of synthetic biology with techniques pioneered by University of California, Berkeley, chemical engineer Jay D. Keasling and colleagues. The Berkeley scientists have managed to engineer a strain of Escherichia coli to produce a high yield of an artemisinin intermediate--amorphadiene--using a metabolic pathway from yeast not found in E. coli.

The next step, Keasling says, is to clone the remaining genes in the plant's artemisinin biosynthetic pathway and insert them, too, into the E. coli to enable it to produce artemisinin. Additional engineering will be necessary for the scientists to reach their goal of reducing the cost of the drug.

Amyris Biotechnologies--a company Keasling founded with colleagues Kinkead Reiling, Neil Renninger, Jack D. Newman, and Vincent J. J. Martin--will take the engineered strain, optimize it further for large-scale production, and develop purification and chemistry finishing processes. The Institute for OneWorld Health in turn will contract with outside firms for preclinical testing and interface with FDA, Woo says. "We hope this will be an example for all the biotech entrepreneurs out there to think about applying their cutting-edge technology to global health."