Wanted: Ex-tobacco farms to join fight

LEXINGTON, KY.» Once known for expertise in growing tobacco, Kentucky is poised to become the epicenter of production of a similar plant that is used to cure malaria, called artemisia or sweet wormwood.

More than 650,000 people — mostly children — die from malaria every year around the world even though it is a treatable disease. The cure itself isn’t new; Chinese medicine described using artemisia in 200 B.C. and the modern Chinese scientist who discovered how it works shared a Nobel Prize for medicine in 2015.

The plants produce a molecule called artemisinin that can cure malaria for only a few dollars a box. But that’s still too expensive for most of the people in the world at risk for getting the mosquitoborne disease, said Kerry Gilmore, who is running a research team at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces in Potsdam, Germany, that has figured out a way to make the medicine much more efficiently and cheaply.

“We make a tea, do an extraction, and take that crude solution that has medicine in it with chlorophyll and put into the reactor and we can now more efficiently convert more to artemisisin,” Gilmore said. “We get more out of the plant without having to add any expensive component. It’s cheaper, more green, and it’s so efficient that we can convert up to 100 times the amount found naturally. We can now produce more artemisinin than ever before . ... That’s what we’re going to be doing in Kentucky.”

Why Kentucky? “We came to Kentucky actually because this crop has been grown in test facilities in places like West Virginia, where there is a similar climate. One of the people on the team was familiar with Kentucky and (Kentucky) House Majority Leader Jonathan Shell ... and recommended looking at Kentucky,” Gilmore said. Shell, who also a farmer, encouraged them to come to here.

The goal is to be producing medication within three years, Gilmore said.

Gilmore is hoping that Kentucky farmers can grow thousands of acres of artemisia to be processed into medicine. And the company formed to commercialize the process, ArtemiFlow, is looking to build a plant to produce the medicine.

Altogether the project is expected to cost at least $30 million and create about 200 jobs, he said. ArtemiFlow is in discussions with several agencies and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on funding.

Most of the existing artemisia crop is grown in Asia but moving largescale production to Kentucky should stabilize supply and could give Kentucky farmers another lucrative crop.