About the Malaria Box

About the Malaria Box

The Malaria Box is no longer available.

The Malaria Box has been assembled by MMV in a bid to catalyse malaria and neglected disease drug discovery and research. All of the compounds have confirmed activity against the blood-stage of P. falciparum and are commercially availableIt includes:

  • 200 diverse drug-like compounds as starting points for oral drug discovery and development
  • 200 diverse probe-like compounds for use as biological tools in malaria research

The final selection, formatted as solutions at 10mM concentration in dimethyl sulfoxide, was distilled from around 20,000 hits generated from an extensive screening campaign of around four million compounds from the libraries of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, TN, USA, Novartis and GSK. The selection was made to provide the broadest cross-section of structural diversity and, in the case of the drug-like compounds, properties commensurate with oral absorption and the minimum presence of toxicophores.

All that is asked in return of Malaria Box users is for the resulting data to be published and placed in the public domain to help continue the virtuous cycle of research.


Malaria Box Challenge Grants

The call for Malaria Box Challenge Grants closed 30 October 2014. The purpose was to encourage investigators to follow up on Malaria Box open source information, available on ChEMBL, and test the Malaria Box compounds and their derivatives in vivo using animal models of neglected infectious diseases.

Read more about this call for applications.

Read the news story about the grants awarded.

Read what the grant recipients say about how this funding will help advance their research.