Malaria drug revolution

We currently have control measures for malaria.

There's three lines of defense, really.

Insecticide-treated bed nets, anti-malarial drugs, and vaccines.

The problem is that mosquitoes have developed resistance to insecticides and that the two approved vaccines that we have, which were indeed major breakthroughs, are imperfect because they don't provide long-term, broad protective immunity.

So we need additional vaccines.

And parasites are constantly developing resistance to the anti-malarials that we've developed.

And we have some amazing anti-malarial drugs.

So we really have quite a problem on our hands that as we continue to fight malaria, it continues to fight back.

And what are you doing to try and take that fight to the parasite?

We started by embarking upon a drug development program.

We were trying to develop drugs that are active not just against the parasite when it infects red blood cells, but when it's moving through its life cycle between mosquitoes, the human liver, and the human blood, and then back to mosquitoes again.

And so when you're developing new anti-malarial drugs, what you'd really like to do is have activity at multiple stages of the parasite's life cycle because it provides you a number of different options.

You may have heard of the saying, prevention is better than cure.

And so what we've embarked upon here is the idea that we can actually use anti-malarial drugs, not only to sort of treat malaria, but also to prevent malaria before it can take hold.

And in doing so, we've unveiled that this drug can elicit a long-lasting immune response in preclinical models that we didn't really expect.