A TEAM of scientists from Liverpool is to be brought to the front line of the global fight against malaria as the recipient of a multimillion-pound grant from Bill Gates, the Microsoft tycoon.

Mr Gates, the world’s richest man, will today pledge the largest single donation to the quest to eradicate malaria, a disease that kills up to 2.7 million people a year. About 75 per cent of victims are African children.

The billionaire paid tribute to the work of the British scientific research community and the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, which will receive more than £28 million for pioneering research into mosquito control.

The grant, which will be channelled into work on insecticides and bed nets to protect populations against mosquitoes, takes the billionaire’s funding announcements for British projects to combat disease to more than £56 million in this year alone.

Mr Gates’s global malaria grant of almost $260 million (£146 million) is shared by the Liverpool team, the Malaria Vaccine Initiative (MVI), which is supporting vaccine research in the UK with GlaxoSmithKline, and the Medicines for Malaria Venture (MMV), based in Geneva. Scientists believe that the grant could facilitate a vaccine in as little as six years.

Mr Gates said that institutions such as the Liverpool school and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, which has also received money from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, deserved support as major contributors to the battle against diseases.

In 1902 Sir Ronald Ross, a Liverpool lecturer, became the first British winner of a Nobel Prize for Medicine for discovering that malaria was transmitted through mosquitoes.

“We are tapping into resources wherever the expertise is, and the UK has a tradition focusing on these tropical disease issues more than other rich countries through an academic tradition both at Liverpool and the London School,” Mr Gates said.

“Millions of children have died from malaria because they were not protected by an insecticide-treated bed net, or did not receive effective treatment. If we expand malaria control programmes, and invest what is needed in research and development, we can stop this tragedy.”

According to a report from a group of malaria research and development organisations, the Malaria R&D Alliance, published today, a fully funded malaria control effort — which could cut malaria deaths in half by 2010 — would cost $3.2 billion annually. However, current spending, a significant amount of which is provided by Mr Gates, makes up only 10 per cent of this figure.

Janet Hemingway, director of the Liverpool school, said that the funding would be vital for pursuing such projects, which remained the key to controlling malaria. She said that longer-lasting insecticides could be used to improve treated bed nets.

Alister Craig, a malaria expert at Liverpool, said that the funding would help to build up a “powerhouse of resources”. “This allows us to develop a coherent, holistic approach — combining experts in regulatory affairs, clinicians, health economists and social scientists — which gives us a much greater chance of real progress.”

Melinda Moree, director of the MVI, said that the funding would help speed the arrival of a vaccine to as early as 2011.

GATES DONATIONS

Gates said he intends to give away 90 per cent of his fortune, valued at more than $51bn (£29bn)

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