Free Republic

A natural biochemical pathway that produces the antimalarial drug artemisinin in the sweet wormwood plant has been fully reconstructed in yeast. The engineered yeast cells churn out high concentrations of a precursor that can be converted in a few steps into the first-line malaria drug. According to the team behind the advance, their semi-synthetic route should help smooth out seasonal variations in supply.Semi-synthetic artemisinin has been in the pipeline since 2006, when Jay Keasling’s group at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, US, reported rewriting the genome of ordinary brewer’s yeast to encourage it to make artemisinic acid.1 But...

A technique Michael Jackson reportedly used to prolong his youth is showing promise as a way to boost the effectiveness of a natural cancer remedy. An environment of pure oxygen at three-and-a-half times normal air pressure adds significantly to the effectiveness of a natural compound already shown to kill cancerous cells, researchers at the University of Washington and Washington State University recently reported in the journal Anticancer Research. The compound artemisinin – isolated from Artemisia annua L, commonly known as wormwood – is a natural remedy widely used to treat malaria. In the mid-1990s UW researchers were the first to...

Artemisinin-based medicines fail a growing number of patients in Cambodia. The malaria parasite, carried by mosquitoes, is growing resistant to artemisinin-based drugs.James Gathany / CDC Malaria parasites in Cambodia are becoming increasingly resistant to the drug hailed as the world's best chance to eradicate the disease.Artemisinin-based drugs are currently the best weapon against malaria, a disease which kills around a million people every year and is spread by mosquitoes carrying malaria parasites such as Plasmodium falciparum. These parasites have already developed resistance to drugs such as chloroquine and sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine, once the front line against the disease, so hopes have been...

Warning that misuse of the most promising new malaria drug could create an incurable strain of the disease, the new chief of the World Health Organization’s malaria program demanded yesterday that 18 pharmaceutical companies stop selling some forms of the drug. After several of the companies refused the demand, the official, Dr. Arata Kochi, made an unusually strong threat for an official of the health organization, saying he would publicly name the companies still selling the drugs three months from now and, if they persisted, would try to disrupt sales of their other medicines. The new drug, artemisinin, a derivative...