Researchers have identified a type of chemical compound that, when applied to insecticide-treated bed nets, appears to kill the malaria-causing parasite in mosquitoes.
Published in the journal Nature, the multi-site collaborative study represents a breakthrough for a disease that continues to claim more than half a million lives worldwide every year.
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ELQ drugs refer to a class of experimental antimalarial drugs known as endochin-like quinolones.
“It was a very clever and novel idea by Dr. Catteruccia and her colleagues to incorporate anti-malarial drugs into bed nets and then to see if the mosquitoes would land on the nets and take up the drug,” Riscoe said. “The idea is the drug kills the parasites that cause malaria instead of the mosquitoes, and our data shows this works.”
Risco said further research is necessary to determine whether the best strategy in the field is to incorporate the antimalarial ELQs together with insecticides in the fibers that are woven into bed nets or simply to use them alone to blunt disease transmission.
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“Insecticide resistance is now extremely common in the mosquitoes that transmit malaria, which jeopardizes many of our most effective control tools,” said Alexandra Probst, M.Pharm, lead author of the study and a Ph.D. candidate in Catteruccia’s lab at Harvard.
“By targeting malaria-causing parasites directly in the mosquito, rather than the mosquito itself, we can circumvent this challenge and continue to reduce the spread of malaria.”
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More information: Alexandra S. Probst et al, In vivo screen of Plasmodium targets for mosquito-based malaria control, Nature (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09039-2
Source: Targeting malaria at the source: Drug-treated nets eliminate parasites in resistant mosquitoes
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