A new international partnership announced last week could bring a malaria prevention tool to 60 million people over the next three years, a milestone tied to more than a decade of research, field studies, and cross-sector collaboration. 

The partnership, involving SC Johnson, the U.S. State Department, and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, will expand access to SC Johnson Guardian™, a spatial repellent designed to keep mosquitoes away from homes, schools and other indoor spaces. 

Researchers from the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs (CCP) helped build the research behind spatial repellents through the Advancing Evidence for Global Implementation of Spatial Repellents (AEGIS) consortium, funded by Unitaid. CCP steered the social science research for the five-year project, which was led by the University of Notre Dame.  

The work examined how the intervention was used in practice across multiple countries, including how households understood it, how it was used alongside bed nets and other malaria prevention tools, and what affected consistent use over time. 

“This moment shows why implementation science matters,” said Debora Freitas López, CCP’s executive director. “Scientific innovation alone is not enough. To have impact, new tools must work in people’s daily lives and within health systems.” 

The work reflects a core principle of social and behavior change research, that even the most promising health tools only make an impact if people can access them, trust them and use them consistently and correctly. 

Malaria still kills more than 600,000 people each year, most of them children under five in sub-Saharan Africa. In many countries, long-lasting insecticide-treated nets and indoor spraying remain the main prevention tools. But progress has slowed in some settings because of insecticide resistance, shifting mosquito behavior that can reduce the effectiveness of existing tools, conflict and gaps in access to care. 

These challenges have increased interest in tools that reduce human–mosquito contact in different settings. 

Spatial repellents work differently from traditional insecticide-based approaches. Instead of killing mosquitoes, they release compounds into the air that discourage mosquitoes from entering or biting in enclosed spaces, including in settings where mosquitoes are increasingly biting outside traditional nighttime hours when bed nets offer protection. 

In 2025, the World Health Organization recommended spatial repellents for malaria prevention, marking the first new vector-control category added in more than 20 years. 

The progress of spatial repellents from research to large-scale rollout also reflects a broader lesson in public health: discovering a new tool is only part of the challenge. 

“The pathway from innovation to impact at scale depends not only on efficacy, but on whether interventions can be meaningfully integrated into communities and health systems in ways that people trust, understand, and can realistically use in their everyday live,” Freitas López says.