Using the case study of the Artemisinin Project (AP), a private-public partnership funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to develop and manufacture cheaper anti-malarial drugs, I seek to investigate the political, cultural, and ethical ramifications of global health initiatives in Dakar, Senegal, and in the San Francisco Bay Area, USA. Researching the particularities of malaria in urban and rural Senegal, I intend to examine the role of non-state governance and structural inequalities in the regulation of health and to problematize the process of a pharmaceuticalization of health. Through the particularities of biomedical research and drug development in the Bay Area, I will contextualize and make visible the underlying conceptual framework of the broader American humanitarian biomedical project and its humanitarian business strategies. Taking the results of ethnographic research done in both sites along with research and analysis of official documents released by partners and of popular media regarding AP, I propose to undertake a mapping of the pathway designed to move a scientific pharmaceutical object from academic lab to an individual experiencing malaria in order to parse out the basic assumptions and points of contention within biomedical humanitarian projects themselves.