Malaria is one of the world’s top killers, wiping out more than 1 million people each year. Yet for the last 60 years, the pharmaceutical industry has largely turned a blind eye to this disease of the developing world. But with increasing globalization comes a responsibility to treat the world’s diseases. While efforts are still comparatively small and targeted, there is progress. This report goes beyond citing the obstacles of drug prices and supply to rooting out even larger and more systemic issues in malaria control and treatment, and it points out complexity even in new advances. Through on-the-ground reporting and original photography in East Africa, the piece highlights the problem of drug counterfeiting and its contribution to resistance to current antimalarial drugs, the need for new science, and-as always in Africa-the problem of access (or as one source puts it, how to get drugs “five miles beyond the tarmac road”). To develop new drugs and ensure the systems to treat the poorest of the poor, the pharmaceutical industry needs new ways of working. Profiled here are best-in-class efforts, including collaborations with third parties that are likeliest to garner the science and on-theground support to move promising compounds through development. And for those who say the disease is impossible to eradicate, Pharm Exec takes stock of new prevention and treatment tools and technology in malaria control that are on the ground and working-and inspires hope in its readers that it is possible, once and for all, to stop the world’s rising death toll from malaria.
