About
Photo: Arne Hoel / World Bank
The Problem
The Mitigating Antimalarial Resistance Consortium in Southern and East Africa (MARC SE-Africa) responds to a growing crisis in malaria, one of the greatest infectious challenges facing Africa. Gains achieved in reducing the burden of malaria and advancing its elimination are now threatened by malaria parasites becoming resistant to the main group of drugs used to treat malaria, the artemisinins.
Artemisinin-based combination treatments (ACTs) are the backbone of all currently recommended malaria treatments. The potential impact of widespread ACT resistance in Africa has been estimated at 16 million more malaria cases and nearly 80 000 additional malaria deaths annually. Protecting the efficacy of current first-line malaria treatments is now a top public health priority.
Our Approach
The MARC SE-Africa project is designed to promote the translation of evidence of artemisinin and other drug resistance of public health significance to inform better malaria policy and practice before drug resistance increases the number of malaria cases and deaths. This consortium will provide technical support to the 18 countries of Southern and East Africa, the area historically first affected by drug resistance.
UCT’s Professor Karen I Barnes is leading the MARC SE-Africa consortium. She explains the importance of the project. “This consortium will provide technical support to facilitate the implementation of the World Health Organisation Strategy to respond to antimalarial drug resistance in Africa in our region. Working together we have the best chance of preventing a repetition of the devastating increase in malaria cases and deaths seen previously with chloroquine resistance.”
As founding director of the UCT MRC Collaborating Centre for Optimising Antimalarial Treatment (CCOAT), Prof Barnes has spent over two decades bridging the research needs of malaria control and elimination programmes. In 2001, Prof Barnes was centrally involved in supporting the first Ministry of Health in Africa (KwaZulu Natal Provincial Department of Health) to deploy artemisinin-based combination treatment. She is co-chair of the South African Malaria Elimination Committee and heads up the Clinical Pharmacology Scientific Module in the WorldWide Antimalarial Resistance Network (WWARN). She has been working with national malaria programmes to establish such a regional network since 2019, with efforts interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The UCT-led consortium includes Infectious Diseases Research Collaboration, Karolinska Institutet, LINQ management GmbH, Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and their Malawi-Liverpool-Wellcome Programme, Stichting Amsterdam Institute for Global Health and Development, Stiftelsen Magic Evidence Ecosystem, University of Oxford with WWARN, University of Melbourne, and the University of Rwanda.
MARC SE-Africa is a 48-month project funded by the Global Health EDCTP3 Joint Undertaking established under the European Unions’ research and innovation programme, Horizon Europe. EDCTP is now a focal point for European research activities, promoting coordinated action to maximise impact on poverty-related infectious diseases.
Initial meeting in July 2019 with representatives of ten national malaria programmes, WHO Afro, WWARN Southern African Regional Hub and the Elimination 8 initiative to plan for a regional network to mitigate the threat of antimalarial resistance.