{"id":91,"date":"2006-04-26T13:16:08","date_gmt":"2006-04-26T18:16:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hoodedhawk.com\/blog\/2006\/04\/26\/cost-of-anti-malarial-drugs-makes-you-think\/"},"modified":"2006-04-26T13:18:13","modified_gmt":"2006-04-26T18:18:13","slug":"cost-of-anti-malarial-drugs-makes-you-think","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hoodedhawk.com\/blog\/cost-of-anti-malarial-drugs-makes-you-think\/","title":{"rendered":"Cost of (anti-malarial) drugs &#8211; makes you think"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Some 300-500 million people suffer from malaria every year, and over a million die from it.  The most effective drug for treatment, artemisinin, is derived from a species of Chinese wormwood.  The process of extracting and purifying artemisinin from this plant is costly, so those that need it most can&#8217;t afford a treatment course.  Also, the supply is very limited so even if they could afford it, there isn&#8217;t enough of the drug to go around.  <\/p>\n<p>The April 13, 2006 issue of Nature has a paper by researchers at UC Berkeley reporting they have tweaked yeast into creating artemisinic acid, a precursor of artemisinin.  Creating artemisinin from the precursor acid is relatively straight-forward.  So, scaling up this process <em>may well result in reducing the cost of the drug by 10-fold<\/em>, bringing a course of treatment within the reach of those who need it.<\/p>\n<p><strong>The current cost of a course of treatment is US $2.40.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s less than the cost of a cup of coffee at Starbucks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Some 300-500 million people suffer from malaria every year, and over a million die from it. The most effective drug for treatment, artemisinin, is derived from a species of Chinese wormwood. The process of extracting and purifying artemisinin from this plant is costly, so those that need it most can&#8217;t afford a treatment course. Also, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1,2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hoodedhawk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hoodedhawk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hoodedhawk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hoodedhawk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hoodedhawk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hoodedhawk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hoodedhawk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hoodedhawk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hoodedhawk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}