Malaria impacts 500 million people around the world, from Afghanistan to Zambia, killing up to 800,000 annually, mostly children. In Africa malaria kills 2,000 children a day. Treatment exists, but access to the critical drug artemisinin, made from the wormwood plant, is in woefully short supply.

To get this essential treatment into the hands of the sickest children around the world, we are using synthetic biology techniques to produce a reliable supply of artemisinin at an affordable price. Collaboration with Amyris Inc. to develop the process is successfully completed in 2009. With partner Sanofi, we have scaled up the process for commercial scale manufacturing and are currently preparing to ramp up production. Our goal: produce enough semisynthetic artemisinin to treat up to 200 million malaria sufferers each year.

Malaria is preventable. By treating kids with highly effective Artemisinin-based Combination Therapies (ACTs), we can stop malaria in its tracks. We are committed to providing ACTs as a low cost, widely available first-line treatment for malaria.

In less than a decade OneWorld Health identified an industrial synthetic microbe for large-scale manufacturing, then secured a royalty-free license from Amyris to enable sanofi-aventis to manufacture and commercialize semisynthetic artemisinin-based drugs—a key ingredient in first-line malaria treatments. As we begin the production of industrial-scale quantities of semi-synthetic artemisinin, we anticipate bringing low-cost artemisinin combination therapies (ACTs) to market towards the middle of 2012.

At OneWorld Health one of our main areas of focus is on the development of affordable medicines that will effectively treat and/or prevent malaria in vulnerable populations. Thanks to a grant of more than $42.6 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation we began researching the production of semisynthetic artemisinin.

In partnership with University of California at Berkeley research labs, a biotech start up Amyris, and with pharmaceutical manufacturer sanofi-aventis, we began the design of a robust process to use fermentation combined with innovative synthetic chemistry to produce artemisinin.

We have completed the industrialization process and are on track to produce large-scale quantities of semisynthetic artemisinin that can be commercialized and brought to millions of malaria victims by 2012.

Sanofi's Impact Malaria initiative

Since 2001, our partner Sanofi has been committed to the global fight against malaria, with the efforts combining accessible drugs and educational programs.

About Impact Malaria

News from Impact Malaria - New study results confirm that Artesunate Amodiaquine Winthrop® is a safe and effective treatment for recurrent uncomplicated Plasmodium falciparum malaria.