By Sola Ogundipe

Towards efforts to accelerate malaria elimination in the country, leading bednet manufacturer, Vestergaard has called for renewed commitment and substantial increases in investment to support the innovations that can help in achieving the 2025 and 2030 malaria goals and accelerate malaria innovation.

The Chief Executive Officer at Vestergaard, Michael Joos who made the call in the concluding segment of its three-part webinar series focused on sustaining progress in the fight to end malaria, said the private sector can play a central role provided a clear innovation pathway is defined, from idea generation to market and enable investments in R&D and manufacturing ramp-up.

“Insecticide resistance is challenging the already fragile gains. We must increase the pace of innovation through strategic partnerships, as it is becoming increasingly more complex to screen new active ingredients, bind them to textiles, and manufacture and scale them as rapidly as possible,” Joos noted.

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During the dialogue series, Vestergaard focused on how the malaria community and private sector can better partner to eliminate the disease, as well as enable strategic procurements to bring product innovation faster and at scale to market.

“What has proven to be a greater challenge is progressing from product prequalification to full-scale implementation.

“Strategic procurement contracts and supportive measures for innovative products to be adopted at scale are essential to support the roll-out of next-generation nets.

“The speed at which we bring such innovative products to market is essential but equally important is the rigorous evidence required to confirming their impact.”

As part of its commitment, Vestergaard pledged technical support in terms of establishing a systematic post-market surveillance framework for LLINs jointly with the National Malaria Elimination Programme, NMEP.

Vanguard News Nigeria