- BBC World News
A malaria vaccine was shown to be 77% effective early in the trials and this could be a crucial step in the fight against the disease, according to the Oxford University team that developed the vaccine.
Malaria is a disease that kills more than 400,000 people a year – mostly children – in sub-Saharan Africa, and it also affects several countries in Latin America.
But despite the fact that numerous vaccines have been tested over the years, none had achieved the targets necessary to be successful.
The researchers noted that the vaccine could have a great impact on public health.
When it was tested on 450 children in Burkina Faso, the vaccine was shown to be safe and revealed a “high level of efficiency“for the next 12 months.
Larger trials will now be carried out with about 5,000 children between the ages of five months and three years in four African countries to confirm the results.
Malaria is a life-threatening disease caused by parasites that are transmitted to humans through mosquito bites.
Although it is preventable and curable, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that there were 229 million cases in the world in 2019 and 409,000 deaths.
The first symptoms of the disease are fever, headache, and chills. Without treatment it can quickly develop into a severe illness that usually leads to death.
“Great impact on health”
Adrian Hill, director of the Jenner Institute, a professor of vaccinology at the University of Oxford, and a co-author of the study, said he believed the vaccine was the first to achieve the WHO goal of at least 75% effective.
The most effective vaccine for malaria to date had only shown 55% efficacy in trials with children in Africa.
Trials of the latest malaria vaccine began in 2019, long before the coronavirus appeared, and the Oxford team developed its covid vaccine building on research done on malaria, Hill said.
Hill further said that the malaria vaccine had taken much longer to develop because there are thousands of genes involved in malaria compared to about a dozen in the coronavirus, and because a very high immune response is needed to fight this disease.
“That is a real technical challenge,” he said. “The vast majority of vaccines have not worked because it is so difficult.”
However, Hill noted that the trial results mean that the vaccine “has the potential to have a major impact on public health“.
In a study submitted to The Lancet journal that has yet to be published or peer-reviewed, the research team – from Oxford, Nanoro in Burkina Faso, and the United States – reported the results of the R21 / Matrix-M trial, which tested a high dose and a low dose of the vaccine between May and August, before the malaria season.
The vaccine showed a 77% effectiveness of the group that received adOhighest sis and 71% in the one who received the lowest dose.
Halidou Tinto, professor of parasitology and principal investigator at the Nanoro Clinical Research Unit, Burkina Faso, says the results are “very exciting” and showed “unprecedented levels of efficacy.”
“We look forward to the next phase III trial to demonstrate its large-scale safety and efficacy data for a vaccine that is greatly needed in this region.”
The Serum Institute of India, which has manufactured the vaccine, says it is confident of delivering more than 200 million doses as soon as it is approved by regulators.
Novavax provided the adjuvant for the vaccine.
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Eddie is an Australian news reporter with over 9 years in the industry and has published on Forbes and tech crunch.