Sharing essential knowledge with health researchers and policy makers

Communities of practice

Meeting the Malaria Treatment Challenge: Effective introduction of new technologies for a sustainable supply of ACTs

24 Nov 2008

Paul Chinnock

Source: The Artemisinin Enterprise (see original article)

The recommendations arising from the recent conference of the Artemisinin Enterprise (see TropIKA.net news story) are summarised in this 48-page report.

The Artemisinin Enterprise (AE) comprises the Centre for Novel Agricultural Products at the University of York, UK; the Institute for OneWorld Health (iOWH) USA; and the Medicines for Malaria Venture (MMV), Switzerland. CNAP focuses on fast track reeding of A annua to increase yields of plant‐derived artemisinin and develop new high‐yielding varieties. iOWH seeks to produce artemisinin derived by microbial fermentation in yeast with subsequent chemical conversion. MMV is developing a novel class of compounds for their incorporation into antimalarial drug combinations.

The objective of the 2008 conference, held in York, was to update the malaria community on project progress and work with stakeholders to ensure a complementary deployment of the new technologies to meet the projected global demand for ACTs. The meeting confirmed that the outputs from all three AE technologies will be essential to satisfy the projected global demand for malaria treatments. Recommendations were agreed for the further development of each of the three projects.

The meeting also issued recommendations for the wider malaria community. These include improving the forecasting of demand for artemisinin and scaling up the introduction of rapid diagnostic tests for malaria. Sustainable and appropriate development of regulatory and pharmaceutical capacity in disease-endemic countries is called for to enable high quality artemisinin to be produced in those countries.