For those of us who were unable to attend the TED conference back in February (my couch cushions just couldn’t quite turn up the $6,000 price of admission), we are in luck! Today, Nathan Myhrvold’s talk was released for the world to see. Check out our founder highlighting several of our malaria projects, along with cameo appearances by 3ric Johanson and Pablos Holman.
We’ve been seeing more and more visitors from the media around here. The most recent journalist to peruse the lab was Newsweek’s Dan Lyons, who was looking for the lowdown on our malaria work. Although the Photonic Fence, a.k.a. the mosquito laser system, has gotten most of the press lately due to Nathan Myhrvold’s TED talk, we have several other malaria projects that are starting to turn heads as well.
The meat of the article follows Karima Nigmatulina, 
Ph.D. and Philip Eckhoff, Ph.D. (pictured above) and their disease modeling software. A few other projects got shout-outs as well. These include malaria detection tools headed by Michael Hegg, Ph.D. and Ben Wilson Ph.D. (pictured below), the artificial mosquito diet of Barcin Acar Ph.D. and Emma Mullen, and of course 3ric Johanson’s Photonic Fence. Even TerraPower managed to sneak in there.
Dan was a machine, bolting from group to group and scrawling endless notes in the process; we watched him fill up three whole pads of paper! The result is “Short-Circuiting Malaria,” which can be found on Newsweek‘s website and will be in print any day now. We appreciate the coverage and are excited that more of our projects are being recognized.
Check out the Newsweek article here.
In our efforts to fight malaria, the Photonic Fence has been getting all the attention lately, but this is just one of several ideas that we are actively working on to combat disease. Another key malaria project is Epidemiological Modeling. This is a highly detailed computer simulation that predicts how the disease spreads at local, regional and global scales. The model takes into account many variables that affect transmission such as temperature, population, transportation, and the use of vaccines, bed nets and even innovations such as the Photonic Fence.
There are a wide variety of epidemiological modeling approaches that many groups use to study malaria. Ultimately, our work and other existing approaches are used to evaluate and predict effective strategies for malaria eradication.
Mathematician, Philip Eckhoff, and computational scientist, Karima Nigmatulina, explain the project and software.
Modeling the Eradication of Malaria
Despite decades of attempts to control malaria, the disease still afflicts some 250 million people every year and claims the lives of about one million, mostly children. The parasite that causes malaria has shown stubborn resilience against the most powerful antimalarial drugs, and the mosquitoes that transmit the parasite have similarly grown resistant to insecticides. Although there is great hope for an effective vaccine, none is yet available.
At Intellectual Ventures, we believe history shows that trying to control malaria is an insufficiently ambitious goal. We in the scientific and technical community should instead develop technologies and strategies that can be used to completely eradicate the disease. Much of the progress we make toward eliminating malaria will also be directly useful in exterminating other infectious plagues of humanity, such as polio and tuberculosis.
Toward this goal, a team led by Dr. Philip Eckhoff is developing a completely original computer model that calculates not only how malaria spreads in a particular part of the world, but also how it will respond to a deliberate suppression campaign. The goal of this model, more ambitious than any similar software ever attempted before, is not just to understand and control the disease, but to stamp it out completely.
Why We Work on Solutions for the Prevention, Detection and Eradication of Malaria
Why are you inventing in this area?
Humanity faces significant global health challenges that have been difficult to solve through traditional methods. Our hope is that through inventive thinking, we can find new ways to tackle some of these issues.
With regard to our malaria projects, we are actively pursuing several invention ideas that could help detect, prevent and eradicate the disease. We believe that introducing the right combination of these technologies—while keeping older approaches in place—will lead to a better chance of completely eradicating malaria.
But why malaria and not AIDS or other health issues?
We have a variety of global health projects underway. One reason we are focusing on malaria first is it is a disease that is both preventable and curable. Yet more than one million people—including half a million children—reportedly died of the disease last year.