The grant, awarded to the Institute
for OneWorld Health, supports a unique three-way partnership among
Keasling at the QB3 Institute, pharmaceutical
manufacturer Amyris, and OneWorld
Health (which will distribute the medicine). The aim of the Gates Foundation
grant is to bring down the cost of treatment to well under a dollar.
Keasling’s research makes this goal possible through the use of
E. coli bacteria that have been genetically engineered to quickly
and cheaply synthesize a precursor to the chemical compound artemisinin.
The idea is to use the modified bacteria as microbial drug factories that
will one day replace the high cost and ecological problems of extracting
artemisinin from the wormwood plant.
Says Keasling, “By inserting genes from three separate organisms
into the E. coli, we’ve created a bacterial strain that can produce
the artemisinin precursor, amorphadiene. We’re now in the process
of cloning the remaining genes needed for the E. coli to produce artemisinin.”
Full
story by Lynn Yarris (Berkeley Lab) -->
Full
story by Robert Sanders (UC Berkeley) -->
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