Medicines for Malaria Venture’s 8th African call for proposals: malaria drug discovery.

Application Deadline: 29 August 2025 at 12:00 pm (CEST).

Applications are now open for the Medicines for Malaria Venture’s 8th African call for proposals.

Eligibility Requirements

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.

Application Procedure:

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.

For More Information:

Visit the Official Webpage of the Medicines for Malaria Venture’s 8th African call for proposals