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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.

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 to this technology to sanofi-aventis for the manufacture and commercialization of artemisinin-based drugs with a goal of market availability by 2012. Once commercial scale production is reached, artemisinin will be available to 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 demand
• Prevent shortage-driven price rises common to plant-based commodities