The first blockbuster drug produced via synthetic biology principles is about to go into large-scale production, offering hope for an affordable treatment to the 500 million people in the world who suffer from malaria. The nonprofit pharmaceutical company Institute for OneWorld Health, together with Amyris Biotechnologies and pharmaceutical company Sanofi-Aventis, have formed a partnership that will jointly manufacture the drug using an synthetic biology-engineered microbe that can make sufficient amounts of artemisinic acid to, with the help of simple chemical steps, produce the antimalarial drug inexpensively enough for widespread use by 2010. The project uses technology from the Keasling laboratory at UC Berkeley and developed through a $43M grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. A dozen genes have been put into yeast and tweaked to work so efficiently together that within three years a house sized 50,000 litre vat of the bugs, fed on a sugar such as dextrose, will grow the entire world's supply of a life-saving antimalarial drug to cut the million deaths, mostly children, caused by the disease every year.
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