April 13, 2006
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Low-cost malaria drug in sight
UC-BERKELEY SCIENTISTS TO GIVE RIGHTS AWAY
By Steve Johnson
Mercury News
Scientists at the University of California-Berkeley announced Wednesday that they have found a potentially dirt-cheap way to treat a global scourge, malaria — and they’ll give the rights to produce it to an East Bay biotechnology company for free.
The Berkeley scientists have developed a strain of yeast that could be used to develop a treatment for malaria they hope will be nearly 10 times cheaper than the current medicine. Although malaria can be treated, it kills more than 1 million people a year, mostly in developing nations that can’t afford the medicine.
Dae-Kyun Ro, the university’s project manager, said the development should make it easier to make artemisinin, the most effective malaria treatment available, in mass quantities. “It can be done, I think,” Ro said.
The job of figuring out how to produce those large amounts of artemisinin now falls to Amyris Biotechnologies of Emeryville, which has been working with the university to develop the malaria treatment. Jay Keasling, a UC-Berkeley professor who oversaw the production of artemisinic acid from yeast, co-founded Amyris and is head of the company’s scientific advisory board.
Operating under a $42.6 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the university-industry partnership group has pledged to develop the drug and make it available in poor countries without making any profit on it.
“The team at UC-Berkeley and Amyris have done a great job moving this important project forward,” said Victoria Hale, founder and chief executive of the Institute for OneWorld Health, a San Francisco non-profit drug company that has been working with the project. “This puts us one step closer to a low-cost treatment for malaria.”
The researchers reported in today’s journal Nature that they have coaxed yeast into producing artemisinic acid, the precursor to artemisinin, the most effective agent available for treating malaria.
The 3-year-old privately held Amyris plans to experiment with various bacteria to help produce artemisinin in large quantities, said company co-founder and President Kinkead Reiling. Under its $12 million grant from the foundation, the company is expected to come up with a useful production method in 2007.
It now takes considerable effort and expense to extract artemisinin from the leaves of Artemisia annua, also known as sweet wormwood. And that keeps the price of the treatment beyond the reach of many people who need it.
Commercial treatments using artemisinin in combination with other drugs now cost about $2.40 for three days’ worth of pills. Although that’s affordable by Western standards, it’s too expensive for many of the 300 million to 500 million people infected by malaria each year, especially in Africa and Asia.
The research collaborators hope to develop a treatment that costs about 25 cents. To help achieve that, the university has issued a royalty-free license to Amyris and OneWorld, which will be in charge of getting the treatment approved by regulators and finding a manufacturer for artemisinin.
If the technology works, Amyris expects to earn some money by selling the artemisinin treatment to U.S. consumers traveling to malaria-prone countries. Reiling added that the firm also hopes to use the technology to develop other low-cost products, such as vitamins, and to attract venture capital.
“That’s how we see it as a win for us,” Reiling said. After only three years, “being on track to potentially have something on the market is pretty rare for a biotechnology company.”
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Langberg: Building up a `bump’ in the new flat world
By Mike Langberg
Mercury News
Don’t be distracted by the rivalry for the Axe, the trophy that goes to the winner of the annual football game between Stanford and Berkeley.
The San Francisco Bay Area thrives, and remains the world’s leading technology center, because it has two strong research universities that often work together in building the regional economy.
A. Richard Newton, engineering dean at the University of California-Berkeley, came to Silicon Valley — usually regarded as Stanford University turf — to deliver that message Tuesday night.
Corporations continue to cut their research budgets, Newton noted during a speech to Berkeley engineering graduates at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. So “the financial and intellectual leverage . . . provided by university campuses . . . is becoming a truly critical resource,” he said.
The Bay Area, in Newton’s view, is a single big corporation that competes with other regional corporations in places such as Seattle, Boston, Shanghai and Bangalore.
“Like any great corporation, we need to recruit, attract and retain the very best knowledge workers in the world,” he told an audience of about 60. “Just as we have been doing for decades now.”
Newton, 54, said intellectual horsepower can keep the Bay Area on top in the face of growing global competition, as described in the influential book “The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century” by New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman.
“In Friedman’s flat world, the corporation itself is ultimately hostage to its employees and to the relationships it must forge with third parties — an area where an attentive nation-state, or even better an attentive local region, can create a real advantage,” Newton said.
If the smartest and most innovative people are here, he argued, then the Bay Area will become a “bump” in the flat world that continues to support greater prosperity and opportunity for its residents.
To help make that happen, Newton is now lobbying Tsing Hua University in Beijing to set up a satellite campus in Berkeley. He’s also trying to lure other top-notch universities around the world, in hopes some of the students who study here will stay — a process he called “intellectual insourcing.”
I went to Newton’s speech, in part, to give Berkeley equal time after writing a column last month calling Stanford the golden goose of Silicon Valley for the many companies created by the university’s students and faculty. That list includes Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, Yahoo, Cisco Systems and Google.
Stanford’s highly visible contributions to the valley have given its grads something of a superiority complex, reflected in an old joke: What does a Berkeley engineer call a Stanford engineer? Boss.
But Berkeley has been a huge, if somewhat less visible, contributor to the creation of Silicon Valley.
Among the roster of famous Berkeley engineering alums are Apple Computer co-founder Stephen Wozniak, computer mouse inventor Douglas Engelbart, Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt and retired Intel Chairman Andy Grove.
Newton, himself a co-founder of valley companies Cadence Design Systems and Synopsys, ended his talk by predicting the next big thing: synthetic biology.
Engineers at Berkeley and elsewhere are starting to tap scientific research on the function of living organisms in order to design custom-made microbes — somewhat in the same way engineers harnessed physics and chemistry 50 years ago to create the first integrated circuits.
“This time these chemical and bioengineers aren’t working with transistors, resistors and capacitors as their components, but rather they are using pathways, enzymes and sequences of base-pairs,” Newton explained.
“But the basic principle is the same — don’t try to use all of biology, but rather define, characterize and re-use a restricted and well-understood library of “bio-components” — “bio-bricks” as this new generation of students refer to them . . . to build entirely new living cells that have a specific purpose.”
Berkeley researchers are already working on microscopic organisms that can turn corn syrup into anti-malarial drugs, and even convert carbon in the air directly into diesel fuel.
“If we can develop these (synthetic biology) industries here in the Bay Area,” Newton concluded, “we will certainly return a new generation of high-paying, high-technology careers to California.”
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