CELT recognise World Malaria Day 2025
Posted on: 25 April 2025 by Rebecca Derrick in LONGEVITY Blog
25 April was designated World Malaria Day in 2007 by the World Health Assembly.
What is World Malaria Day?
The World Health Organization (WHO) herald World Malaria Day as a time “to highlight the need for continued investment and sustained political commitment for malaria prevention and control.”
Malaria is a parasitic disease that often starts with a fever, chills and a headache. It can develop to much more severe symptoms including jaundice, convulsions and breathing difficulty to name a few. Malaria can lead to death, and in pregnant people can cause premature delivery or delivery of babies with low birth weight.
There are behavioural and medical ways to prevent malaria, and ways to treat it if it is contracted. However, malaria is a serious disease and once contracted always requires treatment with medicine.
The WHO have set the 2025 World Malaria Day theme: Malaria ends with us: Reinvest, reimagine, reignite. Organisations such as Medicines for Malaria Venture are utilising this as a platform to emphasize the importance of collaboration within investment, innovation and commitment from the global malaria eradication community.
What is our connection to World Malaria Day?
Co-directed by Professor Andrew Owen and Professor Steve Rannard, The Centre of Excellence for Long-acting Therapeutics (CELT) agrees with this sentiment whole heartedly, and in 2018 delivered the first proof-of-concept for long-acting malaria chemoprophylaxis in collaboration with Johns Hopkins University. We published an article about this malaria chemoprophylaxis work in Nature.
CELT oversees the LONGEVITY project, funded by global health agency Unitaid. LONGEVITY is an international consortium of organisations working to take existing medication and create long-acting versions of them. We are specifically looking at tuberculosis, hepatitis C virus and malaria, with a specific prioritisation for patients in low- and middle- income countries (LMICs).
You can find out more about the malaria work for LONGEVITY via CELT’s malaria page. It looks different to our approach for the other diseases and the research is being delivered as a collaboration between CELT and the School of Pharmacy at Queen’s University Belfast. We are hoping to reach proof of concept of:
- A long-acting formulation of an existing malaria prevention drug that is already on the market, so we know is safe and effective
- The above formulation working as a microarray patch that is robust enough to deliver the medication effectively
- The microarray patch being worn for a few hours then releasing relevant medication for an extended period of time after the patch is removed.
We’re nearing the end of our time on this research, so we’ll hopefully be updating the community on our findings in the coming months.
Why do LONGEVITY want to know if long-acting malaria prevention microarray patches can be made?
According to the WHO’s malaria factsheet, in 2023 there were 263 million cases of malaria globally, with 597,000 deaths from malaria. We know that LMICs are disproportionately impacted by malaria, but it is more regionally skewed than that.
The WHO Africa Region accounted for 94% of those 2023 malaria cases (246 million) and 95% of the deaths from malaria (569,000). Even more difficult is that 76% of the malaria deaths in the WHO Africa Region were children under five years old. From the stats above that means around 432,440 children, between birth and five, died of malaria in one calendar year.
Malaria is both preventable and treatable, but those children’s cases were neither successfully prevented nor successfully treated. When a disease is preventable and treatable there should be far fewer deaths, but 432,440 should not be tolerated.
We need to disrupt the way we view dosing regimens and drug delivery for malaria. Rather than expecting people, especially children, to keep up with an unrealistic pill burden, could we make something that is easy to administer to children and easier for their care-givers to obtain?
We won’t eradicate malaria alone, it’s going to require support and research from many different areas. If we can be part of bringing that awful child mortality number down, be part of eliminating this terrible disease, then all our efforts will have been worth it.
Malaria ends with us: Reinvest, reimagine, reignite.
#WorldMalariaDay
The LONGEVITY project aims to simplify TB, malaria and hepatitis C virus treatment and preventative treatment to reduce the drug burden and the number of patients requiring complex therapies for active disease.
Find out more about the LONGEVITY project
The LONGEVITY Project is funded by global health agency Unitaid
The project also involves critical partners and collaborators in the Clinton Health Access Initiative, Johns Hopkins University, Medicines Patent Pool, Tandem Nano Ltd., Treatment Action Group and the University of Nebraska Medical Center
