Novartis boosts cultivation of anti-malarial plant

Novartis will ramp up cultivation of an anti-malarial plant in Africa to meet spiralling demand for treatments of a disease which kills some one million people a year.

The Swiss drugmaker supplies Coartem, whose main ingredient artemisinin is derived from the artemisia annua plant, on a not-for-profit basis to developing countries stricken by chronic malaria.A shortfall of artemisinin combined with resistance to older treatments such as chloroquine has hampered a global drive to halve deaths from the mosquito-born disease by 2010, prompting Novartis to boost its cultivation of the plant.”Our objective is to increase supplies of the plant across a diversified base,” said Hans Rietveld, who is representing Novartis at a World Health Organization conference on artemisinin-based therapies (ACTs) in Tanzania this week.The artemisia annua plant is native to China, but Novartis said it had teamed up with Kenya’s East African Botanicals (EAB) group to boost cultivation to more than 1,000 hectares in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda.This would bring total production to some 10,000 hectares, Novartis said, spreading the risk posed by adverse weather and enabling the Swiss firm to provide more than 100 million malaria treatments by the end of 2006.Artemisinin-based treatments such as Coartem fight falciparum malaria, the deadliest form of the disease which causes as many as 400 million infections and at least a million deaths a year.The WHO gauges demand for ACTs at some 130 million treatments in 2006, and Rietveld said Novartis’s Coartem drug would account for roughly two thirds of this quantity.”Based on our knowledge today we believe we are well set to meet demand,” Rietveld said by telephone.Tight supplies of ACTs prompted the aid agency Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) to criticize the WHO last month for relying too heavily on Coartem in its anti-malaria program.Last November, Novartis said its traditional Chinese suppliers of artemisinin would only be able to deliver 30 million doses in 2005 — half of the expected demand.French drugmaker Sanofi-Aventis SA is working with a not-for-profit health group to develop its own artemisinin-based combination pill, which it hopes to launch next year. (Source: Reuters Health, June 2005)