More than 750 Million Anti Malaria Treatments for Adults and Children Provided Without Profit
Malaria is still one of the most deadly diseases in developing countries
Today is World Malaria Day. Malaria is preventable and curable, yet it is still one of the most deadly diseases in developing countries. Despite extraordinary progress in the fight against malaria over the last 15 years, the disease still claims the life of a child every two minutes.
Therefore, while we should celebrate success, we must also recognize and overcome key challenges that could slow down the current momentum. More effort is required to scale up access to key interventions (bed nets, diagnostics and drugs) and develop next-generation antimalarial drugs to achieve malaria elimination.
Beyond prevention and treatment, building capacity in malaria-endemic countries to strengthen their healthcare systems and deliver high-quality interventions is also essential to ensuring long-lasting health impacts.
Since 2001, working with a range of organizations, the Novartis Malaria Initiative – one of the pharmaceutical industry’s largest access-to-medicine programs – has provided more than 750 million treatments for adults and children, without profit, to more than 60 countries, contributing to a dramatic reduction of malaria deaths in Africa.
Novartis has a long heritage in antimalarial drug development. Together with our Chinese partners, we developed Coartem®, the first fixed-dose Artemisinin-based Combination Therapy (ACT), launched in 1999. ACT is the current standard of care in malaria treatment. Ahead of the call from the World Health Organization and UNICEF for “child-sized” medicines, Novartis partnered with the Medicines for Malaria Venture to develop a sweet-tasting ACT specifically for children1,2. This was the first pediatric ACT pre-qualified by WHO and recommended for use in the WHO treatment guidelines3. Since its launch in 2009, 300 million treatments have been supplied to malaria-endemic countries without profit helping to cure many millions of children suffering from malaria.
Through a public-private partnership with the Singapore Economic Development Board, the Novartis Institute for Tropical Diseases has led the formation of a research consortium that has already yielded two promising new antimalarial drug candidates currently in Phase 2 clinical trials — both are new classes of compounds that treat malaria in different ways from current therapies and have the potential to combat emerging drug resistance.
Thank you to all our partners, and especially those working on the ground, for their contribution to these extraordinary achievements and for supporting our efforts toward a malaria-free world.
Together, let us must maintain focus until malaria is no more. #EndMalaria
No one should die from malaria today
1. Abdulla S, Sagara I, Borrmann S, D'Alessandro U, Gonzalez R, Hamel M et al. Efficacy and safety of artemether-lumefantrine dispersible tablets compared with crushed commercial tablets in African infants and children with uncomplicated malaria: a randomised, single-blind, multicentre trial. Lancet 2008; 372(9652):1819-1827.
2. Malaria Journal 2010, 9:298.
3. WHO Guidelines for the Treatment of Malaria: Third Edition (2015).
