India contributes to over 40% of the global Plasmodium vivax disease burden, and P. vivax contributes to approximately one-third of all malaria in India. Government of India has set goals to eliminate malaria by 2030. Doing so will require scaling up existing and new strategies, treatments and diagnostic tools. Access to appropriate diagnosis and treatment for P. vivax malaria is currently limited, and it is unclear how new tools will be rolled out. To support the government in its malaria elimination efforts, the current challenges associated with access to best clinical management of vivax malaria must be understood and mitigated to effectively deploy new tools and scale up existing solutions. The recent Food and Drug Administration (US-FDA) as well as Therapeutics Goods Administration (Australian TGA) approval of tafenoquine, developed by GSK GlaxoSmithKline and Medicines for Malaria Venture (MMV) as a new single-dose radical cure treatment for P. vivax malaria, and the commercial availability of new point-of-care glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase (G6PD) tests provide new opportunities to improve clinical management of vivax malaria in India. This report discusses the background, objectives, implementation strategies, and next steps that came out of the Stakeholder Workshop on Malaria Radical Cure in New Delhi, India on 4 February 2019. The focus was to understand the risks and opportunities associated with access to best clinical practices for managing vivax malaria in India. A key outcome was to propose a framework for articulating and segmenting important investment opportunities for improving access to best clinical practices for P. vivax radical cure in India.
Keywords: G6PD; Plasmodium vivax; malaria radical cure; malaria treatment.