Millions from Gates to fight malaria

A British university will benefit from a donation from Bill and Melinda Gates to the tune of £28 million as part of a £145 million gift to malaria research worldwide.

Over the next five years the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is supporting three international projects.

One project at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine will look at ways to control the mosquitoes that spread malaria.

Others will look for new malaria drugs and environmentally-safe insecticides.

Mr Gates has previously said that malaria is a "forgotten epidemic", and millions of children die unnecessarily from malaria because they were not protected by an insecticide-treated bed net, or did not receive effective treatment.

Gates believes an expansion of malaria control programs, and investment in research and development, are needed to stop the tragedy.

Liverpool's Innovative Vector Control Consortium (IVCC), will use its grant to develop safer, more effective, and longer-lasting insecticides for mosquito control, and will also develop improved bed nets and other insecticide-treated materials.

It also aims to help local health authorities determine how to deploy insecticides and bed nets for maximum impact.

Another project - the Malaria Vaccine Initiative (MVI) - is trailing in Mozambique GlaxoSmithKline's malaria vaccine as part of another project.

The MVI will receive £60 million for this work.

The vaccine is appears to offer partial protection for young children, cutting their risk of severe malaria by 58%.

Dr. Melinda Moree, director of MVI says they hope that after further trials, which will involve more than 10,000 children and checks that the vaccine is safe when given with other childhood vaccines, it can be introduced into Africa's immunisation programme by around 2011.

Meanwhile, the Medicines for Malaria Venture (MMV) will receive £56 million to develop new malaria drugs that will be affordable and practical for use in poorer countries.

According to Dr Chris Hentschel from MMV, there is an urgent need for new drugs to treat malaria and they are developing 20 promising compounds, six of which are already in clinical trials.

Experts say there is as much as an 80% resistance in Africa to the commonly used drug chloroquine and that newer artemisinin-based combination drugs were often in short supply and too expensive.

MMV apparently aims to develop a range of effective drugs that cost $1 or less to treat per person.

An international group of malaria organizations, the Malaria R&D Alliance, estimates that £1.8 billion needs to be invested each year in order to cut malaria deaths in half by 2010.

It says more funding is still needed to rapidly expand access to existing malaria control strategies such as bed nets, mosquito control, and combination drug treatment.

Last year $182 million was invested in malaria research and development - less than one-third of 1% of total global spending on health-related research and development.

The Roll Back Malaria Partnership Secretariat said the new funding from the Gates' would make a big difference for research and speedy development of new drugs.

The group say they would like to see funding given to operational research as well, to ensure that communities are able protect themselves against the disease.