Malaria is no laughing matter, but Stephen Colbert generated some laughs when he recently hosted OneWorld Health Malaria Project partner and U.C. Berkeley professor Jay Keasling on The Colbert Report.
While responding to Stephen's jokes, and deflecting his accusations of being a "mad scientist," Dr. Keasling discussed efforts to engineer bacteria that can be used to produce low-cost anti-malarial drugs. This technology is the basis for OneWorld Health's malaria project - our private/public/nonprofit sector collaboration with U.C. Berkeley, Amyris Biotechnologies and sanofi-aventis. Our goal is to create an affordable source of artemisinin, so that even the poorest patients can have access to malaria medicines. Our project also contributes to important goals articulated by the Roll Back Malaria's Global Malaria Action Plan - no preventable deaths from malaria by 2015 and universal access to anti-malarials.
All of us at OneWorld Health are proud of Jay for holding his own with Stephen and we are proud of our work with him to develop safe, effective and affordable anti-malarial drugs for the world's poor who so desperately need it.
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