Challenges in malaria management and a glimpse at some nanotechnological approaches

Malaria is a devastating infectious disease transmitted by mosquitoes, affecting millions of people and killing about half a million children each year. Despite tremendous progress in the control and elimination of malaria within the past years, there are still considerable challenges to be solved. To name a few, drug-resistant parasites, insecticide-resistant mosquitoes and the difficulty to formulate a potent malaria vaccine need to be addressed with new strategies to achieve the final goal of malaria eradication. Nanotechnology-researching and designing innovative structures at the nanoscale-is a promising contemporary technology that is being applied to a vast number of biomedical problems. In the case of malaria, nanotechnology provides tools to design strategies to target drug molecules to specific stages of the parasite, treat drug-resistant parasites, resolve severe malaria, increase vaccine efficacies and combinations thereof. This chapter introduces malaria, discusses current challenges of malaria control and relates these challenges to some potential solutions provided by the nanotechnology field.