 My name is Marta Maia. I'm a medical entomologist and I'm based in Kenya, in Kulifi, the coastal town. I work with insects that transmit disease, in particular malaria. So I'm a specialist in malaria mosquitoes, so to say. Malaria is mostly controlled through the use of bed nets and indoor residual spraying, where people spray insecticides on the walls of houses. Bed nets control mosquitoes because they have, first they're a barrier to the person who's sleeping and also they are impregnated with insecticide. This has been the main method for controlling malaria transmission for the past decades and it has resulted in a dramatic reduction in malaria transmission. However, in the past two years we have not seen a further reduction. I'm working on a new method for controlling malaria mosquitoes. There it's called the endectocides and ivermectin is an endectocide and that means it's a drug that a host takes, so in this case the human takes this drug. And then the mosquitoes, if they bite you, the blood that they take has a small concentration of this blood, which kills them. So some call this a systemic insecticide. Basically, if you treat all the hosts in a given population, not just humans, it can also be the cattle. The mosquitoes will be cornered and this will impact the population by reducing the densities of mosquitoes and their survival and their fitness in the environment, which would then lead to an impact on malaria transmission. Ivermectin is a drug that it's known since many decades. It's been used for control of other diseases, neglected tropical diseases like oncocerciasis and filariasis. And now they're considering repurposing the drug for malaria control because it's been discovered that ivermectin in slow concentrations in human blood results in mosquito mortality or in reduction of mosquito survival. So even if you don't see an immediate impact on the survival of the mosquito, it will hinder them from reaching the age that they are able to transmit the disease. For mosquitoes to transmit malaria, they have to reach 10 to 14 days of age because a mosquito is not born with malaria. They have to take a blood meal from an infected person and then the parasite needs a specific number of days depending on the temperature to develop in the mosquito. So if you would impact the survival of the mosquito even by just two, three days, you may have a dramatic impact on malaria transmission. Ivermectin is a drug that is known to impact parasites, elements, soil transmitted elements, but we also find out that it also has an impact on insects. This is something that is very known in the veterinary field and it's not been adopted in the human medicine, but actually it has an application for malaria control because it will kill the mosquito. The repurposing of Ivermectin, the repurposing of Ivermectin for malaria control has been a very good breakthrough in the past three years and now there are trials that are going to investigate the epidemiological impact of this intervention in the field in Africa. Research in finding new ways to control mosquitoes is really, really important at the moment because the existing interventions, bed nets and IRS, they are no longer as effective as they used to be. Mosquitoes have adapted, they are biting earlier in the evening, they are biting also other hosts, they're finding refuge in other hosts, so finding new methods to control mosquitoes is really, really important at the moment. This would not only reduce mortality and morbidity, but also stop the hitterness that malaria has been for economic growth in developing countries. So we really, really need to invest more in finding new vector control interventions. We are going to conduct two clinical trials in Sub-Saharan Africa to find out if mass drug administration of Ivermectin to humans and cattle may impact malaria transmission. The trials are funded by UNITADE and if we prove that there is an epidemiological impact on malaria transmission, this could lead to evidence to advise policymakers on new interventions that they may implement to eliminate the disease.