Friday, February 23, 2007
Designing microbes for produce a malaria drug that is inexpensive is one of the causes celebres of synthetic biology, a convergence of biotechnology and engineering laboratory building systems running specific tasks. Malaria afflicts 300 to 500 million people and kills more than a million annually: (58 percent of malaria cases occur among the poorest 20 percent of the world's population-especially children who live in 
África.143
África.143 With support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Jay Keasling, professor of chemical engineering at the University of California at Berkeley and director of its center of synthetic biology is building a microbial chemical factory that will manufacture artemisinin, a powerful agent for malaria.
Artemisinin, a natural product extracted from the leaves of a plant known as sweet wormwood or sweet wormwood in various treaties and popular knowledge systems, or Artemisia annua as classification, is an effective treatment against all strains of malaria. The Chinese knew this shrub as a medicinal plant for over 2000 years. Naturally derived artemisinin is scarce. Many experts believe that it is technically possible to grow enough of the sweet wormwood to produce artemisinin to combat malaria everyone mundo.144 suffer in the chemical synthesis of the drug is slow and costosa.145 In 2004, the Berkeley laboratory where he works Keasling, along with innovation company (Amyris) and the Institute for OneWorld Health (nonprofit) received from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation donated $ 43 million for five years to develop a version of artemisinin derived from microbes. Keasling's lab is now designing metabolic pathways designed a yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) to produce intermediate products needed in developing the artemisinina.146 The laboratory and produces acid artemisinic, which is one step away from artemisinin itself. According to Keasling, the next step will require chemical wisdom so that the final product will not arrive soon, it may take ten years before that microbes artemisinic acid distils enough to cure malaria at global.147 If researchers require ten years more to achieve what they propose, how this approach may cost artemisinin-based production of synthetic biology? If, finally, design microbes can produce a treatment for malaria, is it accessible or affordable product? The University of California at Berkeley has awarded OneWorld Health and Amyris a royalty-free license to develop treatment against malaria. Keasling says Amyris will produce the drug at cost and the non-profit (One World Health) will execute the work necessary to overcome the regulatory hurdles. Amyris hopes to use the same technology platform to produce other more profitable drugs. According to the company's website: "The team of scientists and engineers Amyris now tries to sell drugs and other goods of high value fine chemicals extracted from the forests and oceans of the world and to develop these compounds in synthetic microbes." 148
<50-80> However, researchers may be trapped in a complex web of intellectual property rights in both processes and products related to the production of artemisinin - which could force them to negotiate royalties and license fees to many patent holders. Recall, for example, the much publicized case of golden rice with added vitamin A that is trying to remedy nutritional deficiencies of the poor South. Even with public funding, in 2000 researchers developed the Golden Rice (encallejonados of some 70 patents in dispute) had to deliver the giant project agrochemical multinational AstraZeneca (now Syngenta). The controversial golden rice market is still pending.
VivaGel: miniaturization microbicide microbicides The term refers to a range of compounds that are now under development and aims to reduce or prevent transmission of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases when applied topically. Worldwide more than 7 000 women are infected with HIV every day. Some of the people who campaign after the health of women are promoting the development of microbicides because they could put in the hands of women a safe protection, affordable and accesible.149 Microbicides are not commercially available but almost twenty of them being tested in clinical trials. One of vaginal microbicides now being tested in humans, VivaGel (Starpharma), is based on nanoscale molecules called dendrimers, synthetic molecules, three-dimensional branching parts. The active ingredient in VivaGel functions as a "Velcro" molecular (velcro style) which prevents the action of HIV and herpes genital adhering to receptors on the surface of the virus, which prevents the attach to host cells trying infectar.150 VivaGel is a topical microbicide that has the potential to prevent transmission of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases when applied the vagina before sex. In animal studies, the main ingredient of VivaGel also acted as a contraceptive eficaz.151 Market analysts say that if VivaGel can protect against sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy may be a potential competitor to condones.152 VivaGel is the first dendrimer that goes through the process of FDA approval and testing is done today populations in various parts of mundo.153
In 2005, the National Institutes of Public Health was awarded to Starpharma U.S. (based in Melbourne, Australia) the amount of $ 20.3 million to support development in the interests VivaGel of HIV prevention. In April 2006, these same institutions announced they will fund a clinical trial to test the use of VivaGel in the prevention of genital herpes. But ultimately, are they safe, affordable and accessible these vaginal microbicides to those most in need? (Sex workers in Nigeria, which currently apply lemon juice in the vagina in an attempt to protect themselves from contracting HIV, does have access to this protection technology in the near future? 154 Those who are working towards the health of women and suggest that there is a simple technology, low cost (condoms), easy to distribute and store - but condoms are still scarce. For example, in 2003, grants paid the equivalent of one condom per year for every man of reproductive age living in the world desarrollo.155
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