Novartis to support Malaria No More’s Power of One campaign

Novartis is to work with Malaria No More to accelerate progress in the fight against malaria, by supporting the charity organisation's Power of One campaign.

This initiative aims to utilise social, mobile and ecommerce technologies to rally the global public to contribute to this effort, with the aim of closing global funding gaps that have sapped the movement's momentum in recent years.

Over the next three years, Novartis will provide financial support for the campaign and will also donate up to three million full courses of its paediatric antimalarial drug to match the treatments donated by the public.

This will help the global healthcare community to speed up its efforts to eradicate the disease completely.

Joseph Jimenez, Novartis' chief executive officer, said: "Novartis has been striving towards this goal for more than a decade and we just reached the milestone of providing 600 million treatments without profit to patients in malaria-endemic countries."

Earlier this week, the firm announced its financial results for the first quarter of 2013, during which it experienced a two percent year-on-year sales increase.