Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
Deadline: August 29, 2025
The Medicines for Malaria Venture (MMV) has officially launched its 8th African Call for Proposals, inviting scientists and research institutions across Africa to contribute innovative solutions in malaria drug discovery. This call is part of MMV’s long-standing commitment to eliminating malaria through strategic partnerships and research capacity building on the African continent.
The Medicines for Malaria Venture (MMV) initiative focuses on early-stage drug discovery, hit-to-lead, and lead optimization projects that could result in the development of next-generation antimalarial medicines. Researchers with creative, impactful proposals are encouraged to apply and contribute to the fight against drug-resistant malaria strains.
Benefits
- Grant funding for selected research projects
- Access to MMV’s global drug discovery expertise and platforms
- Scientific mentorship from leading malaria researchers
- Opportunity to collaborate with MMV’s R&D partners
- Potential for long-term partnership and support for further development
- Enhanced visibility and credibility in the global health R&D community
Eligibility Criteria
To be eligible for consideration for funding as part of this call, MMV welcomes proposals only from African scientists focused in the following priority areas:
- Compounds with confirmed activity on any antimalarial lifecycle stage: Novel molecules with confirmed activity (EC50 < 10uM) and a medicinal chemistry plan that tackles any known or anticipated liability. In line with MMV strategic goals, priority will be given to compounds with potential for optimization as drugs for chemoprevention with a human half-life >120h.
- Assay development and screening: Assay development and screening to support discovery or development of novel antimalarials.
- Computer-aided drug discovery: Use of computational approaches (cheminformatic and/or bioinformatic) to discover new molecules with predicted antimalarial activity or new antimalarial drug targets.
- NEW Innovative biology: Large molecules, biologics or oligonucleotides for the treatment or chemoprevention of malaria.
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Application Process and Documents Required
The following information will assist you in preparing a focused application.
Please use the Word document template available on the website to submit your application.
The 1st page of your application should outline:
- Project title
- Contact details of Principal Investigator, and partners (if relevant) with areas of
responsibility within the project and a succinct description of their professional expertise
and contribution to the team. - Overall goals of the project and the Target Product Profile focus – treatment,
chemoprevention, or radical cure (delete as appropriate) - Project Focus – to clarify the type of proposal (delete as appropriate)
- Project Status (this may continue into second page)
o For medicinal chemistry proposals: the proposal will only be reviewed if chemical
structures are shown, along with calculated molecular weight, clogP and accompanying
parasitology data. If additional data (e.g., pharmacokinetics, physical properties,
selectivity, in vivo efficacy, etc…) are available then it is in the interest of the applicant
to report these.
o For computational proposals: describe the methodology and its validation.
o For assay development and screening proposals: describe the assay, its goal, its
status, and any screening data obtained.
The 2nd page of your application should: - Highlight the critical issues and how these will be overcome. Examples include:
- Give a brief summary of the medicinal chemistry plan specifically focusing on how the
critical issues will be solved and showing specific compounds that would be made. - Identify gaps in knowledge or a bottleneck that need to be addressed to optimise an
assay and what compounds would be screened. - Give specific timed milestones for the progression of the project and explain what will
be delivered with the grant. - Include maximum 2 literature references, if any.
