Courtesy of Peg Skorpinski
A problem that has seemed intractable for decades may finally be cracking: How to create affordable drug therapies for people who don't offer pharmaceutical companies a commercial market?
Jay Keasling, at the University of California, Berkeley; Amyris Biotechnologies, in Emeryville, Calif.; the Institute for OneWorld Health in San Francisco; and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have formed a public-private partnership to produce a genetically engineered version of one of the world's most effective malaria drugs.
Such partnerships aren't new. The International AIDS Vaccine Initiative in New York and the Geneva-based Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria work in a similar way. But the latest collaboration puts a new twist on the idea. A multimillion-dollar grant will be used to pursue an unproven technology that, if it works, will not only be useful against malaria and other ailments, but also will be given to ...
