The unmet medical and patient need of malaria eradication will not be achieved unless the targeted delivery of new drugs is vastly improved. Encapsulation of drugs in targeted nanovectors has a clear applicability to infectious disease treatment, and pharmaceutical nanotechnology has been identified as a tool in the fight against malaria. Polymers offer virtually unlimited diversity in chemistry, dimensions and topology, which renders them a class of materials that is particularly suitable for applications in nanoscale drug delivery strategies. The objective of NANOpheles is to design polymeric nanovectors for the delivery of antimalarial agents to Plasmodium stages in the mosquito, and to characterise the efficacy of nanovectors and antimalarial agents to reduce mosquito transmission. This objective will be achieved through:

• (i) synthesis of nanocarriers capable of encapsulating antimalarials and of preventing their degradation in storage conditions,
• (ii) engineering of targeted nanovectors capable of delivering their antimalarial contents to Plasmodium stages in the Anopheles mosquito, and
• (iii) evaluation of the effect of selected nanovectors loaded with antimalarial agents on the mosquito stages of Plasmodium and their transmission capacity.