ont face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Narrator: This is Science Today. Chemical engineers at the University of California, Berkeley have found a way to economically produce an anti-malarial drug by taking genes from the plant that makes it and transferring them to a bacterium, which then produces the drug. Jay Keasling, who leads the research, says the same technology can be used to produce an anti-HIV drug.

Keasling: There is a molecule that was actually discovered by the Samoans many decades ago and was used to treat hepatitis. A few years ago, the active ingredient in that concoction was actually elucidated by the National Institutes of Health and they found it was very effective in treating HIV in cell cultures and animals models. It’s now going through clinical trials. We can produce this molecule in the same bacterium that we’ve engineered to produce the anti-malarial drug using very similar technology.

Narrator: For Science Today, I’m Larissa Branin.