Malaria is a devastating disease, with 247 million cases and 619,000 deaths reported in 2021 alone. Malaria causes fever and a flu-like illness that occurs when people are infected with the parasite Plasmodium falciparum, which is spread by mosquitoes. Drugs to treat malaria symptoms and insecticides to kill malaria-spreading mosquitoes have improved in recent decades, but the parasite and the mosquitoes are evolving to become resistant to these strategies.

Therefore, there is an urgent need for new antimalarial drugs, and a key goal is to prevent parasite spread by blocking their passage from human to mosquito, something that depends on the sexual phase of the parasite life cycle. The Baum laboratory along with colleagues at Imperial College London, UK, previously identified a new class of potent antimalarial compounds, belonging to a family of sulphonamides. These compounds kill the parasite only when it is in a specific sexual phase of its life cycle, rapidly stopping it from being able to infect a mosquito and, therefore, preventing any subsequent human infection. In their new Disease Models & Mechanisms article, Baum and colleagues explored exactly how these compounds work, which is an essential step before the compounds can be developed for testing in patients. The lead author of the work, Dr Sabrina Yahiya, commented that "targeting parasite transmission from human to mosquito and back again is pivotal if we hope to reach the goal of worldwide malaria elimination. If you only treat one symptomatic patient, you address their symptoms but neglect the issue of malaria spread. By limiting transmission, however, you can radically curtail the spread of malaria across a population".