By Kieran Guilbert
When Kayode Ojo first fell sick with malaria as a young boy in Nigeria, his grandfather shunned modern medicine, venturing into the bush to search for herbs and plants to treat the disease.
Having succumbed to malaria a further 50 or more times in his life, the United States-based scientist, now in his forties, is determined that his research - to develop a drug to stop transmission from humans back to mosquitoes - will help to eradicate the deadly disease.
"When people in Nigeria, the world's hardest-hit country, get malaria, many simply shrug their shoulders and see it as normal ... that needs to change," Ojo told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a lab at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Ojo is one of thousands of scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs striving to develop innovations to end malaria in a city dubbed the "Silicon Valley of saving lives", which boasts more than 160 organisations working on global health issues.
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Stephen Lim, quoted in this story, is a Professor of Global Health at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington.