Wall Street Journal - December 13, 2004
Marilyn Chase at marilyn.chase@wsj.com

Malaria ranks as the world's third-greatest killer, behind AIDS and tuberculosis, and is the cause of at least 1.5 million deaths and 300 million to 500 million infections a year, mostly in developing countries in Africa and Asia. Caused by a parasite transmitted by the bite of mosquitoes, malaria brings fever, chills, sweating, exhaustion and anemia. Many victims are African infants and toddlers.

The malaria parasite has nimbly evolved to resist some two dozen former first-line drugs. Currently, the treatment of choice is a combination therapy based on artemisinin. Derived from a Chinese shrub, the wormwood plant, artemisinin is a costly and labor-intensive product to make. Priced at about $2.40 for a three-day, six-pill cure, the combo treatment is beyond the reach of the world's neediest patients.

OneWorld Health has assembled a team of partners from academia and the biotechnology industry to develop and scale up a novel production process for making the artemisinin ingredient much more cheaply so that the combo therapy could be supplied for under $1 a treatment.

Such reductions are crucial, said Victoria Hale, founder and chief executive officer of OneWorld Health, because "in endemic countries, young children develop malaria six to eight times a year, and one million of them die. People who don't have access to this drug live on $1 to $2 a day."

Jay Keasling, a chemical engineer at University of California at Berkeley, inserted genes from the wormwood shrub into E. coli bacteria, turning them into factories to produce the drug. The university issued a royalty-free license to OneWorld Health and Amyris Biotechnologies, a private biotech company in Emeryville, Calif., which will begin scaling up production of the synthetic artemisinin compound. In return, Amyris has agreed to sell the drug at cost. OneWorld will handle drug development and regulatory work to demonstrate that the synthetic version is equivalent to the natural product.

Regina Rabinovich, director of infectious diseases at the Seattle-based Gates Foundation, said the foundation was drawn by the partnership's combination of science and a business plan to produce affordable, accessible treatments for malaria. At UC Berkeley, Dr. Keasling added that he hopes the collaboration will serve as a model for attacking a host of neglected diseases in the developing world.

Based in San Francisco, OneWorld Health also has projects under way to develop a malaria vaccine, as well as remedies for diarrheal disease and other insect-borne parasites responsible for Chagas disease in Latin America and visceral leishmaniasis in the Middle East, South Asia and Latin America.

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