Stories of Discovery: Professor Jay Keasling
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Malaria, one of the world’s most threatening diseases, infects 300-500 million people annually. Of the more than one million people who die each year from the disease, 70 per cent are children under the age of five. One of the greatest challenges facing malaria treatment today is drug resistance. Plasmodium, the parasite that causes Malaria, has gained resistance to the chloroquine-based drugs that were used widely in the past. Since the 1970s doctors have used Artemisinin, a compound extracted from sweet wormwood, to treat malaria, and it has proven nearly 100 per cent effective in treating the disease when taken in combination with other antimalarials. Current production techniques, however, are too low-yielding and expensive to be a viable cure for the majority of people living in endemic areas, which lie overwhelmingly in developing countries.
CEND investigator Jay Keasling has discovered a way to provide the drug inexpensively, in order to supply it to as many people as possible. Working at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Professor Keasling has engineered yeast to synthesize artemisinic acid from simple sugars, such as glucose. Artemisinic acid can be converted into artemisinin, or any other derivative of the drug, using known, high yielding chemistry to form a potent family of antimalarial drugs. Unlike plant-extraction, microbial production of arteminisin is not vulnerable to political and environmental climates, and the variety of compounds that can be derived from artemisinic acid could extend the time over which artemisinin can be used without resistance.
Professor Keasling hopes to provide the drug as cheaply as possible to the people who need it most. Once production increases, a single dose may cost just 25 cents. When the majority of the burden of malaria falls on the world’s poorest, cheap access to treatment may be the key to saving millions of lives.
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