Discussion

Despite huge gains made in the last 15 years, Malaria is still a devastating disease causing an estimated 438,000 deaths in 2015 alone. It has been increasingly appreciated that local elimination and global eradication of malaria will require strategies to reduce malaria transmission through the mosquito. This has prompted a renewed search for transmission blocking drugs and vaccines, alongside other novel interventions. The cell biology of malaria transmission stages is highly divergent from that of the asexual parasite stages that cause disease pathology, therefore new drugs with specifically tailored transmission-blocking capabilities need to be developed. To realise this goal, we have implemented a high throughput screening assay guided foremost by Plasmodium transmission stage cell biology to accelerate the eradication agenda.