Breakthrough in battle against super mosquitos
Millions of lives could be saved after a breakthrough in the hunt for new anti-malaria insecticides capable of killing ‘‘super mosquitoes’’.
Deaths from malaria have halved since 2000 to about 600,000 a year, but scientists say that the gains could be reversed by the spread of resistant mosquitoes.
Syngenta, a pesticide manufacturer, has found a new active ingredient with which it expects to produce the first new anti-malaria insecticide for 30 years.
Three other chemicals companies are also close to announcing new active ingredients, raising the prospect of up to four new insecticides being available by the early 2020s.
The Innovative Vector Control Consortium (IVCC), a charity dedicated to tackling insect-borne disease, said that countries in subSaharan Africa were close to the ‘‘tipping point, when resistance rises extremely rapidly, which can result in catastrophic failure of an intervention’’. It was essential, it said, to have several new insecticides to reduce the risk of mosquitoes becoming resistant to any one of them. ‘‘A single insecticide approach is doomed to failure and is why we’re planning for at least three different classes with novel modes of action.’’
The breakthrough, made at Syngenta’s laboratories in Switzerland and Berkshire, comes after four years of research funded by the IVCC. This includes grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and government-run international development agencies in Britain, the United States and Switzerland.
Janet Hemingway, a mosquito expert and director of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, where IVCC is based, said that it had taken 1000 times more insecticide to kill some mosquitoes in west Africa than a decade ago. ‘‘The real worry is that that kind of resistance will spread to the rest of Africa and we will be back where we started [when more than a million people a year died from malaria],’’ Hemingway said.
She added that it would be five to 10 years before the new insecticides were approved, with $50 million spent so far developing them and another $600m needed for approval, including funding trials to confirm their safety.
‘‘They are desperately needed and over time they will save millions of lives,’’ Hemingway said, adding that recent progress in developing a malaria vaccine did not remove the need for new insecticides. ‘‘There is no one silver bullet. A vaccine would need to be coupled with good [insecticides].’’
Phil Wege, Syngenta’s head of biology support, said that the work had to be funded externally because new insecticides were ‘‘not attractive commercially . . . The cost of developing insecticides is huge, but the malaria market is not. The relatively small return you get doesn’t make good business sense.’’
Wege said that tests would have to be carried out on mice, rats and rabbits to ensure that the insecticides were not harmful to young children, who make up most of the victims of malaria.
Ban Ki Moon, the United Nations secretary-general, said last month, that ‘‘malaria control has proven to be one of the smartest investments in health we can make’’.