The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has announced three grants totaling US $168 million to fight malaria – a disease that, due to increased drug resistance, is killing more than one million people annually. The grants will accelerate research on new malaria prevention strategies for children, new drugs to fight drug-resistant malaria, and malaria vaccines.
The funding will support three major research grants focusing on new prevention strategies, new drugs and vaccines. As part of identifying new prevention strategies, US $28 million will be given during a period of five years. This is to be used for research on a promising malaria control strategy known as intermittent preventive treatment in infants (IPTi), a potential way to use existing malaria drugs to dramatically decrease the rate at which young infants become severely ill from malaria.
As part of this approach, infants receive an anti-malaria drug three times during the first year of life, at the time of routine immunization. An initial study completed in 2001 found that the intervention reduced malaria incidence among infants by 59 per cent, and halved the incidence of severe anemia, the most common life-threatening form of malaria in this age group. That this could be achieved by delivery of an available and affordable anti-malaria drug suggests that IPTi could become an important new weapon against the disease.
The foundation has announced US $40 million over five years to the Medicines for Malaria Venture, a public-private partnership based in Geneva, to help fight the spread of drug-resistant malaria by discovering, developing, and delivering new malaria drugs. The grant will provide resources for MMV to advance its impressive pipeline of twenty-one drug development projects, including support to accelerate the development of four promising candidate drugs with significant public health potential. MMV’s goal is to ensure that at least one new anti-malaria drug is licensed by 2010, and to ensure that new drugs are affordable and widely available in developing countries.
The Foundation has also committed US $100 million over four years to the Malaria Vaccine Initiative (MVI), based at Program for Appropriate Technology in Health in Seattle. MVI will use the grant to continue development of 15 vaccine candidates currently in its portfolio, add other promising candidates, assess the potential of new combination vaccines and vaccine technologies, and address financial and policy barriers to vaccine development.
Current spending on malaria control is estimated at $200 million annually – far less than the estimated $1.5 to $2.5 billion needed. If malaria control programs are fully funded, experts project that malaria deaths could be cut in half by 2010 and halved again by 2015. Malaria research is also severely underfunded – current global R&D spending is approximately $100 million annually, far less than the amount needed.