Amyris Biotechnologies, in collaboration with U.C. 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. Resistance to chloroquine-based drugs has developed, but the faster-acting, more effective artemisinin-based drugs 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 microorganisms, Amyris' synthetic biologists have created a process by which artemisinin can be cheaply produced. Amyris will take no profit from the sales of this product to the developing world.