Artemisinin, the expensive life-saving anti-malarial drug is now being extracted from Artemesia annua, a wormwood plant.
UC Berkeley researchers have succeeded two years ago in engineering bacteria to make a chemical precursor of artemisinin. The researchers’ ultimate goal was to retool the microbe’s metabolism to perform as much of the drug synthesis as possible. The laboratory synthesis of artemisinin is so expensive that this proved to be a cheaper option to produce the drug.
That goal has now been achieved by engineering the production of artemisinic acid, one chemical alteration away from artemisinin.
"This is probably as close to artemisinin as we are going to get in microbes. The rest is going to be done by chemistry," said Keasling, His lab partnered with the San Francisco-based Institute for OneWorld Health, a nonprofit pharmaceutical company, and Emeryville, Calif.,-based Amyris Biotechnologies in late 2004 on a $43 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to develop low-cost artemisinin drugs using Keasling's genetically engineered microbes.
The study’s detailed description appears in the April 13 issue of Nature or you can read more at The Biotech-Weblog.
News and Photo Source: UC Berkeley News Release
To read more about the collaboration between the Institute for OneWorld Health, UC Berkeley and Amyris Biotechnologies to develop a low-cost malaria drug, go to the Artemisin Project Website.
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» Animalcules 1.6: Carnival Of The Microbes from The Biotech Weblog
Welcome to Animalcules 1.6, a blog carnival about microbes and anything microbial! It's a pretty lean issue this time, so I'm sure you folks won't have a hard time having a look at these entries: Tara Smith of Aetiology takes... [Read More]
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