| Contacts: Annika Jensen Amyris (510) 450-0761 Jim Hickman Institute for OneWorld Health (415) 421-4700 Karen Wong Keasling Lab (510) 495-2621
Geoffroy Bessaud Sanofi-aventis +33 1 53 77 45 07 |
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OneWorld Health, Amyris Biotechnologies and Sanofi-aventis Announce Development Agreement for Semisynthetic Artemisinin Partnership could help boost Artemisinin supply and treat up to 200 million malaria patients each year
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San Francisco, CA, Emeryville, CA & Paris, France, March 3, 2008 – The Institute for OneWorld Health (iOWH), the US-based nonprofit pharmaceutical company, together with synthetic biology innovator Amyris Biotechnologies, and leading pharmaceutical company sanofi-aventis today announced they have entered into an agreement for the development of semisynthetic artemisinin, a key ingredient in first-line malaria treatments. This partnership will build on technology originated by Professor Jay Keasling at the University of California, Berkeley.
This collaboration aims to create a complementary source of non-seasonal, high-quality and affordable artemisinin to supplement the current botanical supply, thereby enabling millions of people infected with malaria to gain consistent access to lower-cost, life-saving artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs). Under the terms of the agreement, OneWorld Health, Amyris and sanofi-aventis will work jointly to develop and design pilot and commercial scale manufacturing processes, with the goal of introducing low-cost, semisynthetic artemisinin into the supply chain and ACTs in 2010.
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Research Milestone Brings Goal Closer of Inexpensive Antimalarial Drug for Developing World
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Berkeley, Calif. - April 12, 2006 - Researchers striving to create a less expensive version of a life-saving antimalarial drug, artemisinin, have cleared a major hurdle, according to a new report in the journal Nature.
Two and a half years ago, a University of California, Berkeley, team led by Jay D. Keasling, UC Berkeley professor of chemical engineering and bioengineering, succeeded in engineering bacteria to make a chemical precursor of artemisinin – the best drug available today to cure malaria.
The team's ultimate goal was to retool the microbe's metabolism to perform as much of the drug synthesis as possible in order to sidestep the expensive laboratory synthesis needed to make artemisinin. That synthesis would have increased the drug's cost beyond the researchers' ambitious target of 25 cents per dose.
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$42.6 Million Five-Year Grant From Gates Foundation for Antimalarial Drug Brings Together Unique Collaboration of Biotech, Academia and Nonprofit Pharma Effort Could Significantly Reduce Cost, Boost Supplies of Artemisinin
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San Francisco, Calif. - Dec. 13, 2004 - A $42.6 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to the Institute for OneWorld Health, the first nonprofit pharmaceutical company in the United States, will create a powerful new approach to developing a more affordable, accessible cure for malaria, which kills more than a million children each year.
OneWorld Health, which announced the grant today, will work in partnership with the University of California, Berkeley, and Amyris Biotechnologies. UC Berkeley will conduct research to perfect a microbial factory for the compound artemisinin, currently the most effective treatment for malaria, and Amyris, a new biotech company founded on the breakthroughs in synthetic biology pioneered at UC Berkeley, will develop the process for industrial fermentation and commercialization. OneWorld Health will perform the drug development and regulatory work to demonstrate the bio equivalence of microbially-produced artemisinin derivative to the drug's natural form.
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