Stories of Discovery
Crucial to CEND's mission is the effort to develop the university's academic innovations into products, methods, and technology that will have a real-world impact on the fight against emerging and neglected diseases. These Stories of Discovery relay CEND investigators' past successes. Their breakthroughs in such varied fields as microbiology, chemical engineering, genetics, computer science, and disease transmission modeling, have produced critical solutions to alleviating the effects of these diseases.
Jay Keasling - Manufacturing Cheap Anti-malarials
Malaria is one of the world’s most threatening diseases, infecting 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. Yet effective treatment remains expensive and out of reach for the majority of the people affected by the disease. Using synthetic biology, CEND investigator Jay Keasling has engineered microorganisms that cheaply and effectively produce large quantities of artemisinic acid, a precursor to artemisinin, the drug proven most effective in fighting malaria.
(read more about Professor Keasling's work)
David Schaffer - A New Way to Fight HIV
In recent years, improvements in Anti-retroviral (ARV) treatments have helped add years, even decades, to HIV-positive people’s lives. ARVs work by suppressing HIV’s ability to replicate and harm the body. However, although the overwhelming majority of people with HIV live in developing countries, ARV treatments remain prohibitively expensive, and nearly impossible to maintain. CEND investigator David Schaffer has discovered a novel new way to look at fighting HIV, using engineered viruses.
(read more about Professor Schaffer's work)
