 My name is Bob Taylor and I'm a Senior Clinical Research Fellow at Oxford University, but based here in Bangkok at the Mahay Dal Oxford Research Unit, also called Moru. Well, Prémacwyn is a useful drug for malaria elimination for two principal reasons. In patients who have vivax malaria, you have the vivax malaria in the blood that causes your illness, your fever, your headache, your chills, and we treat that with a drug that kills the vivax in the blood. But what's clever about vivax, it can actually, it has a sleeping form that rests in the liver. The sleeping forms in the liver are called hypnozoites, and Prémacwyn kills the hypnozoites. So that's how we can eliminate vivax malaria. We must eliminate the sleeping forms in the liver. The other way that we can use Prémacwyn is for falsoparamalaria. The current thinking with using Prémacwyn for what's called transmission blocking, that is blocking transmission from man or human to the mosquito, is that in the blood we have the malaria parasites that cause your illness, and then as malaria is dividing in the blood, male and female forms are developed, and they're called gametocytes, and the Prémacwyn kills those gametocytes. So you can imagine, if you're giving Prémacwyn on a wide scale to people who have gametocytes at a community level, that should reduce the transmission within the community. Now, in terms of where we can use Prémacwyn, the mathematical modelers are telling us that the best scenario for using Prémacwyn to block the transmission of falsoparamalaria is in areas like in Southeast Asia, where we brought down the burden of malaria quite considerably, and it's in that scenario that Prémacwyn gives us the maximum benefit. So how can we get around the idea of deploying these drugs on a wide scale? Well, that is quite a challenge, because at the moment Prémacwyn is only available in certain tablet strengths, so that limits how you can give the drug easily, for example, to children. So one of the things that I'm working on is working out different tablet strengths for both for vibex, radical cure, and also for transmission blocking. Ideally, if we can come up with an age-base regimen for radical cure, that would be quite helpful. At the moment, taking Prémacwyn requires that you take it for two weeks. The Prémacwyn regimen that we're developing, which won't require testing for geosic pedidioficiency, actually is 20 days long, which is even longer. So we know that the longer treatment courses, the less likely it is that patients will take their medicines. So one study that I'm involved in that I'm coordinating is what's called the improv study, where we give the dose of Prémacwyn for 14 days, but we also give others a dose over seven days, so a double dose over a week. And that's being tested for effectiveness and also how well it's tolerated. So that is a good approach. If you can reduce from 14 days to seven days and it works well and it's tolerated by our patients, then that's good news. Right, this area is particularly played, is perhaps quite a strong word, but we have multi-drug resistant malaria in South East Asia, such that the commonly used first-line drugs, which are called Artemisia-based combinations, they're becoming increasingly ineffective in several countries in our region. So the way to overcome that now, the thinking is that we should do two things. One is we should develop what's called triple anti-malarial drug combinations, where we use three drugs lumped together, a bit like treating tuberculosis. The other thing in parallel is to also develop age-based dosing regimens for transmission blocking in Prémacwyn, because obviously if you dose by age it's much easier compared to dosing by weight. So I'm working on the age-based dosing of Prémacwyn for transmission blocking. We have a regimen that we've developed on paper. We need now to put it into practice in this region. Why should you fund my research? That's a very good question. Well, the research that I'm doing in Prémacwyn is very important, because at the moment very few people are using Prémacwyn. So we want to get to a scenario where we want Prémacwyn to be used en masse in malaria endemic countries. In vivax malaria, although the burden is less compared to falcipara malaria, it causes huge morbidity, economic losses, people don't go to work, they're anemic, their tire, kids don't go to school. The burden of disease is very important. And if we can, for a small amount of money, come up with a dosing regimen of Prémacwyn that doesn't require testing for GCCPD deficiency, that's safe, that's effective, it could have a massive impact on the vivax burden in the world. Well, the term translation medicine I think means different things to different people. One school of thought is going from the bench into humans, and the other, which is where I'm at at the other end of the spectrum, is where you do research in patients or humans, and then you translate it into drug policy. So, for example, if we manage to produce this wonderful regimen of Prémacwyn that is safe, that doesn't require GCCPD testing, our work doesn't stop there. We've now then got to make the enormous step to get it into drug policy in different countries around the world. If the regimen is good, and if we can convince the WHO that it's good and they can recommend it in their treatment guidelines, I think that will be an enormous step, because many malaria endemic countries listen to what the WHO says. So that will be an important step.