The next Prime Minster has the chance to lead the world and help end one of the world's oldest and deadliest diseases.


World Leaders are due to meet this September to replenish the Global Fund to fight AIDS, TB and malaria. Britain has the chance to be back at its best, leading the way with a bold commitment that will help the malaria fight get back on track. 

The new Prime Minster has a chance to show what British leadership can achieve. By stepping up we can fight for what counts. We've helped save 44 million lives over the past twenty years, now let's save 20 million more.

We've come so far, now is not the time for the UK to step back.

One of the first major decisions for the next Prime Minister will be whether to make a bold investment to help end malaria. By investing in the Global Fund our future Prime Minister has the chance to get Britain back at its best.



Britain is home to pioneering and world-beating science. It has the power to take on some of the biggest global challenges - ending one of the world's oldest and deadliest diseases.


Britain has the chance to show strong global leadership by investing in the Global Fund and to get Britain back at its best. 

Back the Global Fund and get Britain back at its best

When Britain leads the world succeeds

Long-lasting insecticide-treated nets have been the backbone of malaria prevention for decades, helping to prevent 68% of malaria cases in Africa between 2000 and 2015. The Interceptor® G2 is a second-generation insecticide-treated net developed by BASF with support from IVCC, specifically in response to studies showing increases in insecticide-resistant mosquitoes.

Interceptor® G2 is a dual active ingredient insecticidal net that is based on a new class of chemistry to which malaria-carrying mosquitoes have not developed resistance and kills about 70% to 97% of the mosquitoes which encounter it. To ensure that these nets reach those who need them most, scientists including experts from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Imperial College London have come together with partners in endemic countries through the New Nets Project, led by IVCC. By 2022, the Project will have distributed over 35 million Interceptor® G2 nets across 13 countries, protecting an estimated 63 million people and averting millions of malaria cases, thanks to funding from The Wellcome Trust and British-backed multilaterals, Unitaid and the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria

To accelerate the fight against malaria. The main thing we need is a commitment to funding. And that includes the international donors and the British government, who have been excellent and one of the largest donors to the malaria campaign.

Mosquito control

Beating insecticide-resistant mosquitoes with a new class of chemistry and next-generation nets

Attractive Targeted Sugar Bait (ATSB®) is a new device developed by biotech company Westham, that is attached to the outside of buildings. It lures the malaria-carrying mosquitoes to their death by appealing to their natural sugar feeding behaviour and thencovering the sugar meal with poison. The ATSB targets mosquitoes that bite outside which may otherwise be missed by existing products like sprays and nets which focus on providing protection inside the home.

The development of ATSB® has been supported by the Innovation Vector Control Consortium(IVCC) using funding from UK Aid and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, bringing together scientists from The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), The Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM), Keele University, Imperial College London, and the University of Oxford. Modelling suggests that this innovation could reduce the number of new malaria cases by 30% when deployed in sub-Saharan countries, possibly starting as early as 2024.

Mosquito Control

Death By Sugar

Since the 1940s over 100 potential malaria vaccines have made it to human trials, but now two vaccines are breaking boundaries and progressing further than any before them – both are developed by UK organisations.

These new malaria vaccines will be an important new tool to add to our toolbox to help us end malaria, layered with other tools like insecticide-treated nets and treatments.

Headquartered in Britain, GSK has been working for over 35 years on a malaria vaccine, alongside partners such as PATH. The result is RTS,S/AS01, the first vaccine proven to protect against 

 malaria. WHO and the Ministries of Healthhave been running a malaria vaccine pilot implementation study (MVIP) in three African countries since 2019 with support from the Global Fund, Gavi and Unitaid– with more than 3 million doses of the vaccine administered so far. 

This vaccine has become the first malaria vaccine to get recommended for broad use by the WHO and receive funding for a global rollout from Gavi.

Oxford University’s Jenner Institute (the people behind the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine) has also been developing a malaria vaccine known as R21, which like RTS,S/AS01 has shown promising results in early trials proving to be 77% effective. It is now in its final stage of human trials.

As scientific advances open new areas of research, UK scientific leadership, expertise and investment will remain critical to ensuring the search for a highly effective malaria vaccine is discovered.

Together with other incredible malaria-fighting tools these new malaria vaccines will allow us to stay one step ahead of the ever-changing malaria parasite and mosquito. With vital investment through the Global Fund, we can save millions of lives and boost UK science and innovation.

Vaccines

After decades of development: A vaccine

 malaria most commonly found in Southeast Asia and Latin America has been treated with a 14-day course of treatment for radical cure – many patients never complete the full course of treatment which increases the chance of a relapse. British pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) has pioneered a revolutionary new treatment that will cure the infection with a single dose.

Working in partnership with MMV, they have developed a drug known as tafenoquine (Kozenis®/Krintafel®), It is the first-ever antimalarial treatment to be delivered as a single dose for the prevention of relapse of 

 malaria, which looks set to combat the challenges posed by previous medicines and improve the process for patients.

Treatments

A revolutionary new treatment that will save lives

If there is one thing the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted it is the importance of is testing to protect us from deadly diseases, both personally and for our collective health security.

New, intelligent diagnostics which integrate with health systems management and detect parasites evading conventional tests are essential both now and in the future. A team at Imperial College London is addressing all these needs at once, developing a smart molecular diagnostics device that brings the lab directly to the patient.

This smart, portable, handheld diagnostic computer can test for malaria and other diseases right where the care is needed, helping people receive and accurate diagnosis and get the correct treatment for their illness. The device uses bluetooth to transmit results to a mobile phone and can report results to a centralised system in real-time to help make more effective public health decisions. Deployed at scale these small devices, could be transformative for the most remote and low-resourced communities, where access to healthcare is challenging.

Malaria overwhelms health systems so that other diseases that might be emerging would be missed. When thinking about global health security, if we can reduce the burden of malaria, we will strengthen the surveillance of new, emerging infections.

Testing

Getting testing to the most vulnerable

We know that the British public are great supporters of excellent science. Continued investment to fight malaria from the UK government is something that would be popular as a policy. It is the right thing to do, and it’s something that will be highly cost-effective in terms of its impact on humanity.

There are more than 3,000 species of mosquito and less than a hundred are able to carry malaria. Malaria parasites attach themselves to the gut of a female Anopheles mosquito and enter a human when she bites us to feed.

Researchers from Imperial College London and Polo GGB, working with partners in West Africa, have successfully suppressed populations of malaria-carrying mosquitoes by using a special type of genetic modification known as gene drives to make female mosquitoes infertile, effectively wiping out the entire population.

Gene drives bias the mosquito’s own genetic inheritance, allowing a genetic modification to spread throughout an entire insect population within a couple of years. A recent experiment, which introduced modified mosquitoes to make up 12.5 and 25% of the study population, led to a complete population collapse in just one year: the first time a gene drive has been shown to be effective when tested in conditions that mimic the natural environment.

This has exciting implications. It could considerably reduce the number of malaria-carrying mosquitoes and therefore the number of malaria cases and deaths. Gene drives do not require regular distribution and can be effective by releasing just a few thousand mosquitoes in several locations, making them low-cost to implement. They are also less affected by resistance and could be used in hard-to-reach areas that are not adequately tackled by existing methods, or alongside the scale-up of existing tools such as nets and insecticides.

Genetically modifying the world’s deadliest creature to wipe it out

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