Gates Foundation invests $ 5 mn in Amyris to reduce cost of malaria treatment

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has signed a stock purchase agreement for a $5-million equity investment in Amyris Inc, the US-based industrial bioscience company. The investment will fund a program to further reduce the cost of one of the world’s leading malaria treatments so that no child has to go without treatment for malaria. The program will focus on the continued production of high-quality and secure supplies of artemisinic acid and amorphadiene to be converted to artemisinin for use in artemisinin combination therapies (ACTs). ACTs are recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO) as the primary first-line treatment for malaria.
   
“We believe in a world where no child should go untreated and that no parent should have to make a choice between treating their child or feeding their family. Lower cost and sustainably-produced artemisinin is a key part of the spectrum of solutions that can help eradicate this disease from our planet,” said John Melo, president & CEO, Amyris.
 
Malaria is a preventable disease that affects over a quarter of a billion people and claims the lives of hundreds of thousands of people every year, mostly children under the age of five in Africa. In addition to its debilitating impact on the health of populations in developing countries, malaria has also been shown to be a major constraint to economic development.
 
Malaria patients can be treated with highly effective artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs), but cultivating and extracting artemisinin, which comes from the Chinese Sweet Wormwood plant, is expensive and time-consuming. Lack of access to this vital compound prevents millions of people in the developing world from receiving critical ACTs.
 
Amyris first developed and applied the technology to create microbial strains that produce artemisinic acid, a precursor of artemisinin, a highly effective anti-malarial therapeutic. This work was funded by a grant awarded from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation via OneWorld Health (now PATH’s Drug Development Program).
 
Amyris is working to ensure access to affordable malaria treatments worldwide. In 2008, Amyris made available its artemisinic acid-producing yeast strains to Sanofi, via OneWorld Health, on a royalty-free basis. Sanofi began using this technology at large-scale to produce artemisinin for ACT treatments with original plans to produce enough semi-synthetic artemisinin for up to 150 million treatments by 2014 and ensure distribution under a ‘no profit, no loss’ principle.