More on Jay Keasling

Rob Katz — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 08:59:30 -0500

An article from the Independent reports that Keasling and his cohorts will have a bioreactor up and running to produce semi-synthetic artemisinin by 2010. My friend Jon Yates, who sent me the article, notes: "Potentially great news for the world and a real challenge for ABE." Indeed.

Pop!Tech - Jay Keasling's Microbes Are Changing the World

Rob Katz — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 10:52:09 -0500

Jay Keasling is the personification of creative destruction. Keasling is an award-winning scientist and the developer of an ultra low-cost source of artemisinin, the active ingredient in anti-malarial drugs. His company, Amyris Biotechnologies, engineers microbes that produce artemisinin at $0.25 per dose – down from $2.40 today.

So how is Keasling the personification of creative destruction? If you’re an artemisinin producer, Keasling’s success is going to put you out of business. And if you’re Acumen Fund – a lead investor in Advanced Bio-Extracts, an artemisinin producer – Keasling changes the return on investment equation.

Of course, creative destruction doesn’t happen tomorrow. ABE has a solid future, and the need for artemisinin far outstrips the supply and will for the foreseeable future. So Jacqueline Novogratz doesn’t have to worry – at least not yet.

Why can ABE and Amyris co-exist? Frankly, the scale of the problem (malaria) makes it possible. The following are excerpts from an excellent article written by Lynn Yaris of the Lawrence Berkeley Lab:

According to the World Health Organization, each year nearly 500 million people living in the tropics and subtropics become infected with malaria, suffering burning fever and severe pain. An estimated one to three million victims die, most of them children.

Medical researchers have been unable to stamp out malaria, but effective antimalarial drugs have been discovered. The best of these is artemisinin and its derivatives, which are nearly 100 percent effective against all known strains of malaria. Artemisinin releases high doses of oxygen-based free radicals that destroy the Plasmodium parasite while it is inside a red blood cell. More than a million malaria patients have already been cured by artemisinin. But the cost of extracting the drug from wormwood trees, which only produce artemisinin under a narrow set of agricultural and climatological conditions, or of manufacturing it entirely through chemical synthesis, is so high that the impoverished populations suffering the most cannot afford it.

Keasling can chemically synthesize artemisinin. He feeds microbes sugar, and the microbes produce the drug - of course, it's way more complicated than that, a fact that Keasling makes light of in his presentation.

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More on Jay Keasling

Pop!Tech - Jay Keasling's Microbes Are Changing the World