Word: artemisinin
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...people are home, an indoor spraying program using the pesticide bendiocarb was launched to interrupt the cycle of transmission. (Small amounts of the chemical are applied directly to walls where mosquitoes like to linger.) At the same time, the Ministry of Health of Equatorial Guinea introduced the use of artemisinin-based combination therapy, the new standard of treatment for malaria in the underdeveloped world...
Keasling, 41, has spent the past 13 years at the University of California, Berkeley, working out how to trick E. coli microbes into churning out synthetic and beneficial versions of plant products. He was particularly interested in molecules known as terpenoids, like artemisinin, which treats malaria; taxol, an anticancer drug; and prostratin, a potential anti-HIV compound...
...Artemisinin is critical to fighting malaria, a deadly global problem that kills up to 3 million people annually. The compound is found in wormwood plants that grow in Southeast Asia but costs $2.40 a dose. In developing countries, that might as well...
That's where Keasling comes in. He's focusing his lab's work on producing synthetic artemisinin to drive down the price per dose to pennies. Keasling and his team at Berkeley have already worked out how to extract the genes responsible for making artemisinin and transplanted them into a harmless strain of E. coli. Now they're furiously working those 100-hour weeks to reroute the metabolic traffic in the microbe and produce oodles of artemisinin...
...cases, with 423 deaths. When the government reintroduced DDT spraying in the middle of that year, the results were dramatic. The number of cases fell almost immediately. By the end of 2001, when doctors began treating their patients with Coartem, a single, multidrug pill that includes an artemisinin derivative, the number of cases had been cut in half. In 2003 the number of deaths was down...