Malaria community must make joint push for funds

But history suggests we cease drug development at our peril. There was a similar hiatus in anti-tuberculosis drug research after the adoption of DOTS (directly observed treatment, short course), the standard treatment for TB that was introduced in 1992, but the emergence of resistance is now causing problems.

Information must be used wisely

Several organisations have recently started to make public the results of their high-throughput screening programmes (see "Glaxo to share malaria drug data"). A huge amount of information is now available, but it is not clear what mechanisms are in place to ensure this information is used wisely and that wasteful duplication is avoided.

Similarly, the absence of key enabling technologies is hampering work in important areas. For example, the lack of workable culture systems for liver stages of the disease, particularly for malaria caused by Plasmodium vivax, is a major block to the discovery of fresh treatments to clear parasites from the liver.

This will be a major challenge for elimination programs in the Asia-Pacific and Latin American regions. But technology development is not always seen as a priority for funding bodies and has not been given the attention it deserves.

A clear, detailed, prioritised and well articulated strategy is something that funding agencies find difficult to resist. Vague proposals may lead them to spread their resources too thinly. A more focused R&D agenda was effective in tackling HIV and is needed for malaria.

The malaria community must come together in a more structured way to set out the priorities for research and identify the roadblocks. Only then can it obtain the resources it needs for new drugs to be developed quickly and efficiently.

CRIMALDDI is an attempt to make this happen.