A malaria vaccine candidate has demonstrated hitherto unmatched efficacy of 77% in trials in Africa, raising hopes of a major breakthrough in the fight against the disease that mainly kills children, its developer said on Friday, Oxford University.
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This vaccine, R21 / Matrix-M, is the first to achieve the 75% efficacy target set by the World Health Organization (WHO), said the university, which works with the American Novavax. Published in the scientific journal The Lancet, “
these new results give great hope in the potential of this vaccine.
", Commented in a press release Professor Adrian Hill, director of the Jenner Institute at the University of Oxford, also behind the anti-Covid vaccine developed with AstraZeneca. The serum, which could be approved within two years, is synonymous with hope as fears of malaria resistance to treatment mount. This parasitic disease transmitted by a mosquito killed more than 400,000 people worldwide in 2019, including two thirds of children under the age of five.
The recruitment of 4,800 children in four African countries has started for the final phase of clinical trials. The vaccine can be manufactured on a large scale and at low cost, its designers pointed out. A partnership has been entered into with the Serum Institute in India (SII), which already produces the anti-Covid vaccine Oxford / AstraZeneca, to "
manufacture at least 200 million doses annually over the next few years,
" according to Adrian Hill. Another vaccine, developed by the British giant GSK, has already been administered to some 650,000 children since 2019 in Malawi, Ghana and Kenya as part of a pilot program launched by the WHO. This is shown to be less effective, preventing 4 out of 10 cases of malaria, and 3 out of 10 cases of severe, life-threatening malaria.
