Malaria research and development will be boosted by a new £1billion fund, the Ross Fund, backed by Britain’s aid budget and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) that was announced yesterday (November 22, 2015).

Announcing the fund Chancellor George Osborne said he had been committed to the fight against malaria since 1997. ‘A staggering one billion people are infected with malaria and 500,000 children die from the parasite each year,’ he said. ‘Our commitment means Britain can continue to play its part in the fight against malaria and working with the BMGF will help us in our joint ambition to see an end to this global disease in our lifetimes.’

The UK Department for International Development (DfID) has a long track record of effective overseas aid and has a particular reason to be proud through its support for the development of new anti-malarial insecticides. These are an essential element of the bednets and indoor residual spraying which, according to a recent report from Oxford University, has been responsibly for vector control was responsible for about 80% of the overall decline in infection prevalence across the continent since 2000 (read the full report) and (a summary of the report).

International Development Secretary Justine Greening said there was reason to be proud of Britain’s contribution to the fight against deadly diseases across the world, and especially malaria, which costs African economies about £8billion every year. ‘A healthy prosperous world is in Britain’s interest and the prevention of deadly diseases is a smart investment,’ she said. ‘That is why working with the BMGF through the Ross Fund, the UK will tackle resistance and develop drugs or insecticides to bring an end to this terrible disease.’

No new public health insecticide has been developed in over 30 years, and with all the current insecticides now compromised by insecticide resistance, the work IVCC is doing with the support of BMGF and DfID is essential to the malaria battle. Since IVCC began in 2000 we have made considerable progress, and expect to have several new anti-malarial insecticides in the field by 2020 for use in bednets and indoor residual spraying. Their use will make insecticide resistance much more difficult to develop in the future. It is a very tangible return on investment by both UK international aid and the BMGF that is already producing practical results that will change the world for the better.

IVCC, a UK based charity, is the only organisation in the world developing new public health insecticides. Our public-private partnership has worked well over the past 10 years, with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the UK, US, and Swiss governments, and from our industry partners.

It’s not often that we think of scientists as heroes. More often than not they are portrayed as being a bit geeky, possibly dangerous. But last year, I began to see them in a different light.

I was in a meeting of scientists, quite a few of them chemists. One of our industrial partners was explaining how they were getting on with the search for a new chemical compound to kill mosquitoes.

Frankly, I didn’t understand most of the discussion because it was highly technical, but I saw a picture emerging of the amazing  battle that these scientists were engaged in every day.

To my highly untrained unscientific mind it sounded like this (please forgive me scientists everywhere, I’m a journalist):

‘We tried to add a blob onto the left quadrant of the compound but that didn’t work so we wrestled a grommet from another compound, and looked at how other scientists had tackled the problem in a completely different area. We lassooed some wild elements and added them to the mix, herding a whole tribe of unique components into the circle. And this strange compound seems to work.’

I know that sounds crazy, but that’s what it sounded like. What touched me was the sense of a battle. These scientists, as it were, struggling to defeat a powerful enemy that was fighting back in every direction.

That’s where the idea of Heroic Chemistry came from. It grew when I visited Burkina Faso and saw the work local scientists are doing at our field trial sites. Not only are they testing the new compounds to see if they work where it matters, where malaria is endemic, but they’re also testing to see if local insecticide-resistant mosquitoes are affected by the new compounds. And African scientists, who live with the problem on their doorstep, are also beginning to see new patterns of mosquito behaviour and think about completely new solutions. These are people who’ve suffered from malaria every year of their lives so they know the battleground well.

It’s all very exciting. We are not too far away from having several new designed-from-scratch insecticides available to fight malaria. According to a group of leading academics (Bhatt et al, Nature.com 2015) insecticide treated bed nets and indoor residual spraying with insecticides are responsible for the biggest part of the gains in the battle against malaria over the past 15 years. Nearly 78% of the cases averted are due to vector control, which means about 500 million people protected from malaria.

That’s why the work these scientists are doing is heroic. It really does have the potential to change the world as we know it. Millions of liveswill continue to be saved, millions of children will grow up into healthy productive lives, some of the poorest countries in the world will reap the economic benefits of a healthy population.

That’s why I wanted to make this film. To say thank you to the scientists who, behind the scenes, make it all happen. You’re my heroes.