Crypto News: Using the Covid playbook on malaria

Hi! It's Madison in New York. A type of drug that became a game-changer during the pandemic may be the next big thing in malaria prevention. But first...

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Most people are by now familiar with the monoclonal antibody drugs used to prevent and treat severe Covid-19 infections. But antibody drugs have a variety of other uses in medicine from cancer treatment to preventing viral illnesses like RSV. They have even shown promise in slowing disease progression from Alzheimer's.

Soon, antibody drugs could also be used to prevent another disease: malaria. Early study results showed that when administered intravenously, a high-dose of an antibody drug developed by scientists at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases was about 88% effective at shielding adults from infection in Mali over the 6-month malaria season.

Those results are early days, but if they hold up in later studies it could be a game-changer.

Malaria is caused by parasite-infected mosquitoes. But recently mosquitoes have begun developing resistance to insecticides intended to control their populations. Parasites resistant to some antimalarial drugs have also been found Africa and Southeast Asia.

The NIAID study's results also suggest an antibody drug could be more effective than the first-line artemisinin-based antimalarial drugs that are widely used to defend against the disease. (The antibody was 88% effective at preventing disease, while other studies estimate antimalarial drugs are around 72% effective at treating disease globally.)

The antibody drug's efficacy in the study stunned researchers. "I did a double-take, I couldn't believe it," Peter Crompton, a malaria expert at NIAID who is leading the work with other National Institutes of Health colleagues, told me.

Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, United Republic of Tanzania and Mozambique accounted for more than half of all malaria deaths worldwide in 2020, data show. Malaria can be especially dangerous for young children and expecting mothers in areas where there is high transmission, according to the World Health Organization. Available malaria drugs aren't safe for expectant mothers in their first trimester.

A monoclonal antibody used in combination with other control measures could offer a viable solution to the growing resistance threats, Crompton says. It might also offer a simpler approach: Current malaria drugs need to be administered more frequently, which can be difficult to adhere to in countries with limited health-care access. An antibody infusion or injection could likely be taken just once a year, before the start of the malaria season.

But Crompton said his team has struggled to find a pharmaceutical company willing to produce the antibody.

By some measures, malaria is the deadliest disease in history. Some researchers suggest that it has killed half of the humans that have ever walked the earth, among them King Tut and, possibly Alexander the Great. Today it is preventable and treatable, but it still causes many hundreds of thousands of deaths each year. But the places most impacted by this deadly disease often lack resources and funding to either access cutting-edge drugs or create their own. And antibody drugs, like the ones used in cancer treatment, can be extremely expensive.

Crompton, though, is optimistic that they can get costs down far enough to bring this new approach to the people who need it.

"There have to be other funding mechanisms for this type of thing," he says. —Madison Muller

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