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The test against a new malaria vaccine at Oxford University indicates that it is 77 per cent effective, far better than the existing shots to prevent one of the world’s deadliest diseases.
The owner, known as R21, is the first to be able to pass a vaccine that could exceed the World Health Organization’s goal of at least 75 percent effectiveness by 2030. Mosquirix, the first malaria vaccine to be launched in early 2015, required GSK to take more than 30 years to develop and 39 percent effective for four years.
In phase 2b of R21 – in the middle phase – participants in a group of higher doses were 77% less likely to develop malaria in the 12-month follow-up than those who received a rage as a control. Those who received a lower dose of the vaccine helper were 71 percent less likely to develop the disease. There were no serious side effects.
The study included 450 children aged 5 months to 17 months in Burkina Faso.
Oxford researchers, Working with the Indian Serum Institute and the US vaccine manufacturer Novavax, have already launched a phase 3 trial to test the vaccine in a larger population. Existing participants were also given a booster shot.
The recombinant fusion protein vaccine combines an antigen that signals the immune system to increase efficacy with Novavax’s Matrix-M helper. Novavax uses the helper in its Covid-19 vaccine, a phase 3 trial with 89 percent effectiveness.
Adrian Hill, director of the Jenner Institute in Oxford, who helped develop the Oxford / AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine, said the draft paper explaining the data from the R21 trial was co-authored, saying the new results support “high expectations” for the vaccine.
“Our commercial partner, the Serum Institute of India, is committed to manufacturing at least 200m doses annually in the coming years if the vaccine has the potential to have a significant impact on public health if it is licensed,” he said.
Malaria it causes more than 400,000 deaths a year, mostly among children in Africa. 229 million clinical cases of the disease were reported in 2019.
But there has been a struggle to find a vaccine to fight the disease, with more than 100 candidates examined in clinical trials.
Halidou Tinto, regional director of the Institut de Recherche en Sciences de la Santé at the Burkina Faso department in Nanido, and the trial’s lead researcher, said he hoped to demonstrate large-scale effectiveness in the phase 3 trial.
“These are very exciting results that show an unprecedented level of efficacy in the well-tolerated vaccine in our testing program,” he said.
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