Press Releases

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

Nonprofit Pharmaceutical Company Advocates for New Drug Therapies, Partnerships and Public Engagement to Achieve Goal of No Preventable Deaths from Malaria

San Francisco, USA and Patna, Bihar, India - April 24, 2009

The Institute for OneWorld Health, the US-based non-profit pharmaceutical company that develops drugs for people with neglected infectious diseases in the developing world, today marked World Malaria Day by renewing its call for new treatments and innovative partnerships to combat malaria in developing countries and eradicate the disease worldwide.

"Malaria kills over one million people and infects nearly half a billion people each year. It will take aggressive public, private and nonprofit partnerships to combat this widespread disease and prevent so many needless deaths," said Dr. Richard Chin, M.D., OneWorld Health's Chief Executive Officer. "OneWorld Health is proud to be working in collaboration with our 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 is working in partnership with: the University of California at Berkeley, Amyris Biotechnologies and leading pharmaceutical company sanofi-aventis on the development of semisynthetic artemisinin, a key ingredient in first-line treatments for malaria. This unique collaboration aims to create a complementary source of non-seasonal, high-quality and affordable artemisinin to supplement the current botanical supply and meet future demand, 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.

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. The partnership is building on technology originated by Professor Jay Keasling at the University of California, Berkeley.  Sanofi-aventis joined the partnership in 2008.

OneWorld Health is grateful to our partners, advisors, funders and other collaborators for their support of our work (http://www.oneworldhealth.org/How_We_Work).

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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/ <http://www.oneworldhealth.org/media_center>

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