Press Releases

Institute for OneWorld Health Marks World Malaria Day with Call for Innovative New Treatments and Collaborations to Combat Global Health Crisis

SAN FRANCISCO, USA AND PATNA, BIHAR, INDIA - April 25, 2008

The Institute for OneWorld Health (iOWH), the US-based nonprofit pharmaceutical company that develops drugs for people with infectious diseases in the developing world, today marked the first-ever World Malaria Day by renewing its call for new treatments and innovative partnerships to combat malaria in developing countries and in support of the global call for eradication of the disease from the planet. Formerly Africa Malaria Day, this global event is now recognized as World Malaria Day to reflect the widespread burden of the disease and global efforts to control, eliminate, and ultimately eradicate the disease.

“The worldwide toll of malaria is staggering and it will take the collective efforts of public, private and nonprofit partnerships to combat this disease and save lives,” said Nina Grove, OneWorld Health’s Vice President for Commercial Planning & Malaria Programs. OneWorld Health works in collaboration with for-profit and non-profit partners to develop safe, effective, and affordable drugs to treat the millions of impoverished individuals who are afflicted with malaria each year.”

OneWorld Health recently announced that it expanded its partnership with synthetic biology innovator Amyris to include leading pharmaceutical company sanofi-aventis for the development of semisynthetic artemisinin, a key ingredient in first-line treatments for malaria, which kills over one million and infects up to half a billion people each year. Malaria disproportionately affects impoverished populations, particularly children under five and pregnant women, with the majority of the burden carried by countries in Sub Saharan Africa.

This unique 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).

If technical milestones can be achieved, at commercial scale, this alternative artemisinin source would supplement the supply that is currently extracted from the sweet wormwood plant (Artemisia annua). This complementary supply would ensure enough artemisinin for ACTs to treat the more than 500 million estimated individuals who contract malaria each year. It would also improve the availability of high-quality artemisinin derivatives to drug manufacturers and contribute to stabilizing the price of artemisinin-containing antimalarials for the benefit of patients and payers.

The partnership is building on technology originated by Professor Jay Keasling at the University of California, Berkeley. OneWorld Health, UC Berkeley and Amyris have been working together as the Artemisinin Project since late 2004 to develop a new, low-cost technology platform to produce artemisinin with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

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About the Institute for OneWorld Health

The Institute for OneWorld Health, the first US nonprofit pharmaceutical company, develops safe, effective and affordable medicines for people with neglected diseases of the developing world. The Institute for OneWorld Health, headquartered in San Francisco, California, USA, is a tax-exempt 501 (c) (3) US corporation. (http://www.oneworldhealth.org/) ). Media resources are available at http://www.oneworldhealth.org/media/index.php/ .

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