A New Weapon Against Malaria

Over the past three years, the COVID-19 pandemic has dominated headlines and spurred scientific research, with experts around the world focusing resources and any potentially useful technology on the problem. While the spotlight on COVID-19 has dimmed slightly, it remains a high global priority, sometimes to the detriment of infectious diseases linked to poverty and primarily affecting the Global South. For example, Malaria killed an estimated 619,000 people – most of them children in SubSaharan Africa – in 2021, when there were 247 million cases worldwide. Malaria is an entirely preventable and treatable disease, and researchers have made great strides on both fronts. In March, for example, the World Health Organization recommended two new dual-ingredient insecticide-treated bed nets to protect against malariatransmitting Anopheles mosquitoes, one with a more lethal cocktail of insecticides, and the other able to disrupt mosquito growth and reproduction. Cost-effective antimalarial medicines are another important tool. In 2021, seasonal malaria chemoprevention was administered to around 45 million children aged three months to five years, who received monthly doses of therapeutic drugs at a cost of less than $4 per person. The recent news of a groundbreaking vaccine, GSK’s Mosquirix (also known as RTS,S), offers some hope, although the cost is still relatively high, at around $40 per child for the first year. Despite these efforts, malaria continues to pose a threat to public health. Even after an investment of $26 billion to tackle the disease in Sub-Saharan Africa, the number of cases increased slightly between 2000 and 2019 (although the number of deaths decreased). New prevention measures – tailored to children, in particular – are clearly needed. Further innovation should take a page from the pandemic playbook: one benefit of the flood of COVID-19 research is that it demonstrated the enormous potential of monoclonal antibodies. These drugs are laboratorymade copies of the proteins that a person’s immune system produces to attack specific foreign invaders. Historically, monoclonal antibodies have served as a powerful weapon against cancer and autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and lupus. While not often used as a prophylactic, the deployment of monoclonal antibodies to prevent COVID-19 and respiratory syncytial virus has shown great promise. Moreover, their exquisite selectivity