Bill Gates venture and GE sign malaria licensing deal with Access Bio

A collaboration between Bill Gates and Intellectual Ventures (IV), in partnership with conglomerate GE, has signed a licensing deal with US diagnostics technology company Access Bio to make and sell tools for “rapidly” identifying asymptomatic malaria.

According to a statement by IV, the technologies will help health workers in low-resource regions around the world, adding that “identifying these low-level infections is considered critical to directing efforts towards malaria elimination”.

The diagnostics were developed by GE’s Global Research Center and Global Good, a venture between IV and Bill Gates that invents technology aimed at supporting people in low and middle-income countries.

GE Ventures, which acts as GE’s strategic arm in the area of innovation and growth, spearheaded the commercialisation model and licensing agreement between the parties.

The IV statement said the agreement covers a test that identifies key proteins present in malaria, as well as Plasmodium lactate dehydrogenase rapid diagnostic tests (RDT) to detect malarial parasites.

The deal also includes technology to create malaria serology tests for Plasmodium antibodies which can measure a population’s previous exposure to the disease, the statement added.

Maurizio Vecchione, executive vice president of Global Good & Research, said that significantly enhancing the sensitivity of malaria RDTs addresses gaps in rapid diagnostics “that will bring us closer to eliminating the deadly disease in more and more regions around the world”.

Joseph Suriano, technical discipline leader at GE Global Research, added that by being able to see if a population has been recently exposed to the malaria parasite with serology tests, “we can then efficiently target the use of more rapid, highly sensitive tests and other anti-malarial interventions to act before outbreaks occur”.

Malaria is still a great threat to many of the world’s poorest people.

The World Health Organization (WHO) says nearly half of the global population is at risk, while the latest statistics show that in 2015 there were around 212 million malaria cases and 429,000 deaths. In its “Global Technical Strategy for Malaria 2016–2030”, the WHO set a target of reducing the incidence and mortality rates of malaria worldwide by at least 90% by 2030.