A $42.6 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to the Institute for OneWorld Health, the first nonprofit pharmaceutical company in the United States, will create a powerful new approach to developing a more affordable, accessible cure for malaria, which kills more than a million children each year. OneWorld Health, which announced the grant today, will work in partnership with the University of California, Berkeley, and Amyris Biotechnologies. UC Berkeley will conduct research to perfect a microbial factory for the compound artemisinin, currently the most effective treatment for malaria, and Amyris, a new biotech company founded on the breakthroughs in synthetic biology pioneered at UC Berkeley, will develop the process for industrial fermentation and commercialization. OneWorld Health will perform the drug development and regulatory work to demonstrate the bioequivalence of microbially-produced artemisinin derivative to the drug’s natural form.
