In 1907, Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. It was awarded for his discovery that it was possible to identify the parasites that cause infectious diseases – such as malaria – in the blood. Since then, the diagnosis of malaria has proved challenging and continues to rely heavily on microscopy. But what if there was a better way?

To mark World Malaria Day, we interviewed Professor Sanjeev Krishna, whose wide-ranging research has spanned clinical trials of antimalarial treatments, mechanisms of drug resistance, and identification of the likely target of artemisinin, among much else.

Professor Krishna, who’s a Section Editor for BMC Infectious Diseases, is now leading a major EU programme, Nanomal, developing an affordable point-of-care diagnostic device for malaria. We talked to him about the challenges of diagnosis and what he’d like to see in the future. Here’s what he had to say…

Professor Krishna will also be talking about his work at the Challenges in Malaria Research Conference in London in September this year.