Synthetic Malarial drug -- A Trump card to kick Deadly Malaria out of sight...

Malaria awareness

Malaria is  a fatal disease that is responsible for so many deaths in the world.Though there is a approved treatment available for malaria, the malaria drugs are obtained naturally from plants. Due to fluctuations in the climatic conditions of the earth  the supply of this drug is not consistent. This created a big void between supply and demand which took away many lives. There is an estimate that Malaria sickens millions of people each year, killing at least 650,000 annually, mostly children. This made biologists think about synthetic ways to produce malaria drug. 

For the first time, researchers have successfully engineered a strain of baker’s yeast capable of supplying  malaria drugs on an industrial scale.The French pharmaceutical giant Sanofi has already begun brewing the microbes and announced plans to generate 70 million doses this year.The advance is the result of a 10-year odyssey in synthetic biology, the wholesale engineering of an organism’s genetic and metabolic system for practical purposes. 
    “This is the first synthetic biology project that has been scaled up to industrial manufacturing and will have a real impact in the world,” says Jack Newman, chief scientific officer at Amyris. “There should never been a shortage of artemisinin ever again.”



What is the need of this research??
Artemisinin (group of drugs that possess the most rapid action of all current drugs against Plasmodium falciparum malaria) is the primary ingredient in artemisinin combination therapies, the World Health Organization’s preferred malaria treatment. But because the drug is primarily derived from plants, its costs can vary from $350 to $1200 per kilogram of the active ingredient. “The botanical supply is inconsistent for various reasons, including weather and incentives for farmers,” says Ponni Subbiah, global program leader for drug development at OneWorld Health, a nonprofit drug development organization that funded the research through a grant from the "Gates Foundation".The synthetic process can run year round and takes about three months, compared to 15 months for plant-based methods. “Our aim is to stabilize the supply independent of the plant supply,” says Chris Paddon, who leads the artemisinin project at Amyris.
    OneWorldHealth has licensed the technology to Sanofi, which has already produced nearly 40 tons of the artemisinic acid. (The acid is then chemically converted into artemisinin.) Sanofi aims to produce 60 tons of the material next year —approximately 120 million courses of treatment — and has pledged to sell it without profit.

 With this advancement in synthetic biology its clear that after a long battle with this deadly disease     MAN stands out to be the ultimate winner.