Mosquito nets fight malaria with chemistry

Mosquito nets are low-cost weapons in the war on malaria, but the biting bugs have become resistant to the insecticides used on these nets. Researchers have now created a chemical arsenal that doesn’t kill mosquitoes but destroys the malaria parasites within them instead. These inexpensive, long-lasting compounds could be incorporated into netting to prevent malaria transmission (Nature 2025, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09039-2).

“This strategy is pretty straightforward, but it’s one that we have not really tried to implement in the field before,” says Alexandra S. Probst, a graduate student who worked on the project, which was led by Dyann F. Wirth and Flaminia Catteruccia at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health.

The researchers screened antimalarial compounds to find out which ones killed the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum in live mosquitoes when applied directly and when the insects landed on a surface coated with the antimalarials. Chemical tweaks to a promising hit yielded two endochin-like quinolones (ELQs)—ELQ-453 and ELQ-613—that target different regions of a key protein in the parasite. The scientists loaded these ELQs onto samples of the polymers used to make the nets and found the materials were effective at killing the malaria parasite even after a year in the laboratory.

David A. Fidock, an expert in malaria at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, says the work illustrates how US National Institutes of Health–funded research can rapidly bring benefits to hundreds of millions of people exposed to malaria each year. He says in an email that applying these antimalarials to insecticide-treated bed nets could help prevent the disease, “which in 2023 killed nearly 600,000 individuals, mainly young African children.”