How
While the global research and deployment communities have had some notable success in reducing the transmission of malaria and other vector-borne diseases, it is not enough, and in fact, the situation is once again rapidly deteriorating. Not only is malaria transmission increasing as a direct result of withdrawal of funding from major donors such as the US and UK, concomitantly disease and vector surveillance in being gutted across Africa.
A quick read of the table below will reveal that current vector control tools that are being used so extensively in LMICs simply fail to address many vector physiological and behavioural attributes, causing wide and deadly gaps in the deployment of the currently-available vector control tools.
Such is the scale of the problem that we clearly need novel vector control interventions. But that is in no way enough. We can invent vector-control technology faster than we can deploy it. We are therefore building as fast as is humanly possible a deployment machine — involving evaluation, incentives, and a self-funding open, commercial model — that will close the gap between invention and deployment of new effective ways to control vector-borne diseases like malaria.
Our approaches include, but are not limited to:
A shared, open cluster-RCT evaluation harness. One rigorous, reusable proving ground that any intervention on the spectrum can be tested through — so the bottleneck stops being bespoke trials.
A staged prize competitionto pull in talent and approaches from outside the usual consortia, evaluated through that shared harness. It runs in three stages: a wide, low-barrier entry, then two rounds that progressively narrow the field, with the teams that advance winning larger tranches of seed funding to develop their design, and a grand prize for the finalist that clears the bar.
Give-it-away-by-design — funded, not charitable. Tier by who can pay. Humanitarian applications go through the open harness and are given away. Agricultural and high-income biosecurity applications (screwworm for the US cattle industry, Aedes suppression for southern Europe) are commercialised, and those returns cross-subsidise the give-away. The cross-subsidy is the engine, not a compromise.
An advance market commitment, running in parallel. A pledge — co-funded with other funders — to top up the price of any tool that meets an agreed target product profile and is actually procured and deployed, so that a proven winner meets a guaranteed market rather than a valley of death.
Where the staged prize pulls the innovation into being, the market commitment pulls it through to deployment; the two run at once and bite at different points — the prize on the researcher and developer, the commitment on the manufacturer and implementer.