Novartis is on track to produce 100 million treatment courses of its anti-malarial Coartem (artemether/lumefantrine) in 2006 (up from 30 million in 2005) if orders are placed by malaria-endemic developing countries in a timely manner. Coartem is the only pre-qualified, fixed-dose artemisinin-based combination therapy (ACT) and achieves cure rates of up to 95%.

Novartis continues to provide Coartem at cost for public sector use in developing countries where the disease is endemic. Novartis received orders for 14 million Coartem treatments for delivery in 2005.

"Malaria-endemic countries can place orders for Coartem confident that Novartis has taken all the necessary steps to sustain supply of this life-saving drug," said Dr. Daniel Vasella, chairman and CEO of Novartis.

To achieve the unprecedented scale-up in production, the company invested heavily in expanding production capacity at state-of-the-art manufacturing facilities in Beijing, China and Suffern, New York, as well as extending the supply agreements to procure raw materials and active ingredients in Africa and China. The two Chinese firms that manufacture the active ingredients are Kunming Pharmaceutical Corporation (KPC) which provides artemether, and Zhejiang Medicine Company (ZMC) which provides lumefantrine, recently completed major capacity-expansion programmes to help insure continued supply of Coartem, informs a Novartis release.

With a cure rate of above 95% and very few side effects, Coartem clears parasites from the blood faster than other non-artemisinin anti-malaria drugs, also helping to reduce the transmission of the disease. In some regions of Africa, the number of malaria cases has dropped by more than 90% when ACTs were used in combination with other malaria control measures.

"We have seen much success from our malaria control efforts in Zambia, including the nationwide usage of Coartem in the public sector. We have witnessed a 10.5% drop in malaria incidences in 2004 as compared to 2003, and a decline in malaria deaths from 50,000 to 33,000 over the same time period," said Dr. Naawa Sipilanyambe, coordinator of the country's National Malaria Control Programme.

At Macha Mission Hospital in rural Zambia, paediatric malaria cases were reduced by 90% over the past three years.

Worldwide, experts estimate that there are between 300 and 500 million new cases of malaria each year, resulting in over one million deaths annually, 90% of which occur in children in Africa.

Coartem is the only pre-qualified, fixed-dose ACT combining artemether, an artemisinin derivative, and lumefantrine. It is a highly effective and well-tolerated anti-malarial that achieves cure rates of up to 95%, even in areas of multi-drug resistance.