In this photo taken Feb. 1, 2012, Prof. Peter Seeberger, a former Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who now teaches at Berlin’s Free University poses with a model of a molecule model at his laboratory in Berlin, Germany. German scientists have developed a new way to make a key malaria drug that they say could easily quadruple production and drop the price significantly, increasing the availability of treatment for a disease that kills hundreds of thousands every year. Chemists at the Max Planck Institute take the waste product from the creation of the drug artemisinin—artemisinic acid—and convert it into the drug itself. Artemisinin is extracted from sweet wormwood, a plant that primarily grows in China and Vietnam and varies in its availability according to the season. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber) |
BERLIN
(AP)—German scientists have developed a new way to make a key malaria
drug that they say could easily quadruple production and drop the price
significantly, increasing the availability of treatment for a disease
that kills hundreds of thousands every year.
Chemists
at the Max Planck Institute take the waste product from the creation of
the drug artemisinin—artemisinic acid—and convert it into the drug
itself.
The
entire apparatus is compact, about the size of a carry-on suitcase, and
inexpensive. That means it can be easily added to production sites
anywhere around the world.
“Four
hundred of these would be enough to make a world supply of
artemisinin,” said unit director Peter Seeberger, pointing to the
machine on a table in his lab in Berlin’s Dahlem neighborhood. “The
beauty of these things is they’re very small and very mobile.”
A paper on the new technique was published this month in chemistry journal Angewandte Chemie.
Artemisinin
is extracted from sweet wormwood, a plant that primarily grows in China
and Vietnam and varies in its availability according to the season. In
the extraction process, for every part artemisinin produced, there is 10
times the amount of artemisinic acid discarded as waste.
Past
attempts to convert the acid using ultraviolet light to trigger the
conversion have been unsuccessful because the process took several steps
in a large tank of acid, making production inefficient and far too
expensive.
So
the Max Planck chemists thought small—creating a machine that pumps all
of the required ingredients through a thin tube wrapped around a UV
lamp in a continuous process that takes 4 1/2 minutes from
start-to-finish to produce the artemisinin.
The
technique can convert about 40% of the waste acid into
artemisinin—producing four times more of the drug from what had in the
past been discarded, Seeberger said.
Colin
Sutherland, a malaria expert at the London School of Hygiene and
Tropical Medicine who was not involved in the Max Planck research, said
the development could be significant in boosting production of the key
malaria drug. He noted that currently very little artemisinin can be
made from a large amount of the sweet wormwood, which is also difficult
to grow.
“If
it’s a simple process, given a certain amount of plant material, you
can generate more drugs, that will make things cheaper and faster,” he
said.
Since
the end product is the same molecule, there should be no decrease in
effectiveness of the synthetic product, Sutherland said.
Seeberger
said a commercial prototype of the Max Planck machine could be ready in
about six months and that it could go into production in about a year.
He said current price estimates are around euro100,000 (US$132,000).
When it’s in production, the idea is to make it available for a minimal fee to cover costs, he said.
“The
goal is to make sure that the drug is produced and made available to as
many people as possible,” said Seeberger, a former Massachusetts
Institute of Technology professor who now teaches at Berlin’s Free
University.
Sabine
Haubenreisser, a spokeswoman at the European Medicines Agency, said
that if the new drug is close enough to the original, its producers
could apply for it to be considered as a generic product or use older
data proving artemesinin’s effectiveness—which could speed the approval
process.
Malaria
cases and deaths have been dropping since 2004, due largely to
campaigns to distribute bednets, spray homes with insecticide and make
better drugs available. The World Health Organization estimates that at
least 655,000 people die of malaria every year, mostly children under 5
in Africa.
At
the moment, artemisinin-based therapies are considered the best
treatment, but cost about $10 per dose—far too much for impoverished
communities.
Former
U.S. President Bill Clinton’s Clinton Foundation currently has a
program to purchase the treatments, then sell them at a deeply
discounted 50 cents to communities where they’re most needed.
Cutting the price further while increasing production could “make a big difference,” said Sutherland.
“Many
times more children will have access to the right drug early in their
disease and that’s likely to have an impact on mortality.”
AP Medical Writer Maria Cheng contributed to this report from London.
Continuous-Flow Synthesis of the Anti-Malaria Drug Artemisinin
SOURCE: The Associated Press
