A Less Expensive Malaria Treatment Is Coming

The World Health Organization estimates that approximately 655,000 people die from malaria each year, mostly children under 5 in Africa. The best treatment for the disease is artemisinin, a drug extracted from the sweet wormwood plant, which grows primarily in Vietnam and China. Current processing and refining of wormwood extract into artemisinin makes the drug too expansive for widespread use in the poor areas where malaria is most common.

Chemists at the Max Planck Institute in Germany have taken the waste product from the creation of artemisinin, artemisinic acid, and converted it to artemisinin itself through exposure to ultraviolet light. The device for conversion is about the size of a briefcase. Such a small piece of equipment could be added to production sites anywhere in the world. Ten times as much waste product comes from the production of the drug using current technology than usable artemisinin.

A paper discussing the new production technique was published this month I Angewandte Chemie, a chemistry journal.

The Associated Press covered this story and provided this quote:
"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."Others have tried to convert the artemisinic acid to artemisinin using ultraviolet light, but the process took several steps in a large tank of acid, making the technique expensive and inefficient. The Max Planck chemists created a small machijne that pumps required ingredients through a thin tube wrapped around a UV lamp. The process is continuous and takes about four and one-half minutes in total.
　
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