The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation of Seattle has given a $43 million dollars grant to aid in the development of a genetically engineered form of a Chinese herbal drug that is thought to be effective in curing malaria. The foundation has given the money to Jay Keasling, a UC Berkeley chemical engineering, Amyris Biotechnologies, a company set up by former students of Keasling, and the Institute for OneWorld Health, a San Francisco firm that will handle the clinical trials and the Food and Drug Administration approval process.

This consortium will work on creating a less expensive form of the herb artemisinin, which occurs naturally as a derivative of the dried leaves of the wormwood plant. The Chinese have been using Artemisinin since A.D. 150 to treat fevers but it was in Vietnam that it was first found to be effective in reducing deaths from malaria.

Finding treatment for malaria is critical in that new strains are proving to be resistant against current forms of treatment. Over 500 million people a year contract this disease, which kills 1.5 million of them. The World Health Organization has acknowledged that combining antibiotics with an herbal extract is the only known medicine to stop the disease. Malaria is actually a parasite within the blood stream of those afflicted.

In synthesizing artemisinin, the cost for a three-day sequence of treatment can be significantly reduced, and made more readily available to cash-poor countries in Asia and Africa where the disease is most prevalent.