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VA researcher Dr. Michael Riscoe built the Portland VA Chemical Library, a collection of more than 10,000 compounds now driving global antimalarial research. ©VA Research/Portland VA
September 12, 2025
By Marcus Henry
VA Research Communications
"VA support built this library. It's really the intellectual memory of our lab and the legacy I'll leave behind."
BBC News, Discover Wildlife, Business Insider, CNET – they all place the mosquito as the deadliest animal on the planet, with 725,000 to a million kills every year. Their weapon of choice? Disease, and foremost among the arsenal is malaria.
Enter the unlikely hero, Dr. Michael Riscoe of the Portland, Oregon, VA. He has spent decades building the Portland VA Chemical Library—a collection of more than 10,000 compounds designed and tested with VA support since the late 1980s.
“VA support built this library,” said Riscoe. “It’s been a fun and fulfilling project, and it shows how VA investment can have reach far beyond our walls. It’s really the intellectual memory of our lab and the legacy I’ll leave behind.”
The library became the foundation for a breakthrough collaboration with Harvard researcher Dr. Flaminia Catteruccia. Their research teams came together to explore a bold idea: instead of coating bed nets with insecticides to kill mosquitoes, coat them with antimalarial drugs to cure the mosquitoes of infection, stopping transmission at its source.
For curing the mosquitos, some of Riscoe’s compounds, a class known as quinolones, proved to be the most effective. What started as a VA Merit Review–funded effort has now grown into a globally recognized resource for antimalarial drug discovery. Riscoe credits VA’s role at every step.
“The VA has just been critical for support,” he said. “Not just financial support, but the infrastructure — labs, equipment, and the ability to work side by side with physician scientists. It’s where the chemicals are made and where the discoveries happen.”
U.S. Service members have battled malaria from the Revolutionary War to Afghanistan, often with imperfect drugs that carried dangerous side effects. Pesticides also carry their own health risks, unlike the quinolones from Riscoe’s research.
“If these drugs are safe enough for children and pregnant women, they’re going to be plenty safe for U.S. soldiers,” Riscoe explained. “Future Veterans will benefit from this work.”
Riscoe emphasized that collaboration has been central to success. Along with Harvard, the team is working with the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio to design bed nets that will be tested in African villages later this year. This groundbreaking work was recently published in Nature as a powerful example of VA-funded science having global health impacts.
“I was just really proud that three labs could come together and bring about that paper,” he said. “It was exactly the way science is supposed to work.”
As if trying to de-arm the world’s greatest killer wasn’t enough, Riscoe added the Portland VA Chemical Library is an untapped resource against other diseases.
“All of these compounds have been tested against malaria, but not against cancer or other human diseases,” Riscoe said.
Not yet, perhaps, but VA physician-scientist collaborators are now exploring new directions for the compound library that could lead to treatments for other conditions affecting Veterans.
Marcus Henry is a writer/editor with VA’s Office of Research and Development. This story is part of VA Research Currents, which highlights research that matters to Veterans.
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