A single dose of nitisinone (approximately 0.1 milligram per kilogram of body weight) could make someone’s blood deadly to mosquitoes for around five days, they found. However, no mosquito mortality was observed for “any single dose of ivermectin,” the team reported.

In a separate analysis, the researchers fed mosquitoes blood samples from three patients with alkaptonuria who regularly took 2 mg of nitisinone a day. All of the mosquitoes died within 12 hours of feeding. Blood from a patient with alkaptonuria who had not started the treatment was not toxic to mosquitoes.

Taken together, these findings suggest that nitisinone therapy could be a promising new malaria-control method. However, the researchers cautioned that there are still many hurdles to overcome before the drug could be used for this purpose.