Amyris Biotechnologies, in collaboration with the University of California, Berkeley, and the Institute for One World Health - with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation - is applying the tools of synthetic biology to address the critical need in the developing world for an effective and affordable anti-malarial treatment. Malaria infects 300-500 million people and causes 1-2 million deaths each year, primarily children in Africa and Asia. More than half of the deaths occur among the poorest 20 percent of the world's population. One of the principal obstacles to addressing this global health threat is a lack of effective, affordable drugs. The chloroquine-based drugs that were used widely in the past have lost effectiveness because the Plasmodium parasite, which causes malaria, has become resistant to them. The faster-acting, more effective artemisinin-based drugs - as currently produced from plant sources - are too expensive for large-scale use in the countries where they are needed most. Artemisinin has been extracted from finely ground sweet wormwood for more than 2,000 years as a treatment for a variety of ailments, but the method is expensive, time consuming and limited by access to wormwood, found mainly in China and Vietnam. By inserting genes from three separate organisms into E. coli, Amyris' synthetic biologists have created a bacterial strain with a new metabolic pathway that enables it to produce the precursor to artemisinin - the first step toward mass-producing a low-cost and effective solution to malaria in developing countries.