OneWorld, Sanofi a year away with semisynthetic malaria drug

Seven years, nearly $50 million in Bill Gates’ cash and a web of partnerships later, nonprofit drug developer OneWorld Health is on the verge of delivering a synthetic ingredient key to making new anti-malarial drugs cheaper.
To get there, the organization has had to ditch highrise offices in San Francisco’s financial district for a nondescript two-story building in South San Francisco and cut half of its employees to conserve cash. But OneWorld and French drug maker Sanofi, which recently started scaling up production in a 100,000-liter fermentation facility, expect to release their semisynthetic version of artemisinin in about 12 months.