Each year, between 300 and 500 million people, most of them poor, become infected with malaria, and at least 1.5 million die, primarily children in Africa and Asia.
"With UC Berkeley's innovative technology, Amyris' advancement of this new process, and our drug development and regulatory expertise, we'll provide a new, scalable and stable supply of affordable antimalarials for the developing world," said Victoria Hale, Ph.D., founder and CEO of OneWorld Health.
To ensure affordability, UC Berkeley has issued a royalty-free license to both OneWorld Health and Amyris, of Albany, Calif., to develop the technology for malaria treatments. In exchange, Amyris will produce the drugs at cost, and OneWorld Health will perform the detailed non-clinical regulatory work that will be required by United States and other global agencies to allow the low-cost, microbially-based product to be substituted for plant-based product by manufacturers of combination drugs containing artemisinin. The nonprofit nature of this partnership could be a model for attacking neglected diseases in the developing world, said Jay Keasling, Ph.D., professor of chemical engineering at UC Berkeley, who created the genetically engineered microbial drug factories. Keasling also is director of the synthetic biology department at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a California Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Research (QB3) faculty affiliate.
"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," he said. "In many ways, this project is a dream project: interesting science, high technology, rapid transition from the bench to the bedside, and
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Contact: Robert Sanders
rsanders@berkeley.edu
510-643-6998
University of California - Berkeley
13-Dec-2004