Keystone Symposia: The Malaria Endgame: Innovation in Therapeutics, Vector Control and Public Health Tools

Malaria is most prevalent in the tropical belt and many malaria endemic countries have now engaged in elimination programs. However, we are facing a public health crisis because we have lost many of the public health tools that enabled the progress we have made to date. Many drugs are useless in most areas and resistance is threatening even artemisinin-based combination therapy (ACT). Diagnostics, bed-nets and insecticides are also losing their effectiveness and the Plasmodium vivax (P. vivax) parasite is finding new ways to transmit in Duffy negative patients. At the same time, there are multiple emerging threats such as artemisinin drug resistance, the rise of P. vivax malaria prevalence, and the discovery of the parasite Plasmodium knowlesi (P. knowlesi) in humans. However, there are some interesting developments such as deploying older suboptimal drugs in new, innovative and targeted control approaches like seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC) or intermittent preventive treatment of pregnant women/ infants (PTi/p). There are new drugs on the horizon that have pharmacological properties compatible with single dose cures and could prove to be powerful tools in the fight against malaria. For example, mass drug administration has demonstrated substantial impact as an intervention for Plasmodium elimination. By learning from recent successes in malaria elimination, epidemiological models of malaria transmission can be updated, and the impact of new interventions will critically inform the malaria endgame strategy. The conference is organized around three themes: defeating resistance (both to drugs and to insecticides), leveraging data science to better understand disease transmission and innovation in vector control strategies. This program will assess the current threats and gaps in our malaria armamentarium to enable malaria elimination and discuss the emerging innovative approaches for antimalarial drug discovery and development.

Topics: malaria, infectious diseases, mosquito-borne illness