Former US president Bill Clinton has forged a deal with six pharmaceutical companies from China and India to lower the price of an anti-malaria drug in order to make it more affordable to poor patients infected with the disease.

The deal is trying to control price of artemisinin, an extract of the plant known as wormwood or safewort, the key raw ingredient for artemisinin-based combination therapy (ACT) and to lower it by 70 percent, Clinton said, according to AFP.

“Nearly every life lost to malaria could have been saved with access to effective medicines," Clinton said in a statement. Today's announcement is an important step forward in global efforts to increase access to affordable and effective malaria treatment. I applaud the commitments of these companies to lower volatility in this market and offer low and sustainable prices that will save more lives.”

During the past few years, the price of this ingredient has been as little as $350 a pound to as much as $2.200 because of the high demand on the market.

Under the deal, two Chinese suppliers of artemisinin will sell it to four Indian companies at no more than $136 a pound, Dai Ellis, The Clinton Foundation’s executive vice president for access programs said.

The companies included in the agreement are the Mumbai-based firms Calyx, Mangalam, Icpa and Cipla and China’s Holleypharm in Chongqing and PIDI Standard in Guangzhou.

Under the deal, the price of the anti-malaria drug will be lowered by 30 percent. Lowering the price, the drug will be affordable in 69 countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean.

Malaria, spread by mosquito bites, infects some 500 million people each year, with more than one million of them dying, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s data show. The infection’s symptoms include fever, chills, nausea, and shortness of breath.