PARTNERS
Three San Francisco Bay Area entities have teamed up with France based pharmaceutical company sanofi-aventis to combine their unique, complementary expertise to develop semisynthetic artemisinin. Their synergistic approach applies cutting-edge technology to create a source of semisynthetic artemisinin for use as a raw material in artemisinin-based combination therapies, the most effective—but presently too expensive—known antimalarial treatments.

The Institute for One World Health is the product development lead and has responsibility for directing this collaborative effort; as well as lead the project's public policy and global access goals.

Amyris is optimizing the microbial strain and using it in the development of a manufacturing process to make high quality semisynthetic artemisinin.

Sanofi-aventis is providing fermentation and chemistry process development expertise, and if technical benchmarks are achieved, will develop an industrial manufacturing process for semisynthetic artemisinin.

The University of California at Berkeley has utilized synthetic biology to develop a microbial strain to produce artemisinic acid. The University of California at Berkeley completed its portion of the development efforts in December 2007.

By combining their capabilities, the partners will work together to develop a manufacturing process for semisynthetic artemisinin. Ultimately, the goal is to produce hundreds of metric tons of artemisinic acid by fermentation, for subsequent chemical conversion to artemisinin. Together, this unique partnership will help ACT producers deliver life-saving medicines into the hands of people with malaria in the developing world.