Scientists at the institute are inching closer to a commercialisation for anti-malarial drugs.
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute are close to commercialising a range of anti-malarial drugs on a cost-effective large-scale.
The continuous flow system yields artemisinin derivatives. Artemisinin can be either isolated from a Chinese herb called sweet wormwood – artesimia annua – or produced using genetically engineered yeast. It is basis for the currently most efficient drugs against malaria.
The particular advance that the Max Planck scientists made has been figuring out how exactly to create artemisinin artificially. Extracting it from the plant has made the drugs highly cost-inefficient and led to up to 50% of supposedly artemisinin-based drugs in Africa and South East Asia to be fakes. The researchers use artemisinic acid, a byproduct of artemisinin production, to synthesise the material. The chemical reaction is caused by light, so that the researchers were able to pump the acid through a looping tube system around a lamp.
Since this artificial creation was perfected in 2012, the scientists have managed to use the resulting artemisinin as the basis for drug candidates. The flow system leads to a purified material to the standards set by the World Health Organisation.
While the institute has said that it is close to commercialisation, a full timeline has not been announced yet.
Peter Seeberger, researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Colloids and Interfaces in Potsdam-Golm, said: “The goal is to produce as much as possible, at the lowest price, to make it accessible to most people.”
