Promising malaria vaccine clears clinical hurdle, could get WHO endorsement next week

The world may soon have another powerful weapon against malaria, a disease that kills half a million people each year, most of them young children. Data from a trial involving 4800 children in four African countries suggest a vaccine developed at the University of Oxford, known as R21/MatrixM, provides significant protection against the disease. The results were posted as a preprint this week , and observers expect the World Health Organization (WHO) to announce its endorsement for use of the vaccine at a press conference scheduled for Monday. That would make R21 the second WHO-approved vaccine for use against malaria. The first, called RTS,S or Mosquirix, was recommended for use in 2021 and has been given to 1.8 million children in Ghana, Malawi, and Kenya. Doses are expected to arrive in nine more countries in Africa by the end of the year. But the 18 million doses of that vaccine that are expected to be available between now and 2025 “are only about 10% of what we need” to protect the estimated 40 million children who are born every year in malaria-affected areas, says Matthew Laurens, a malaria vaccine expert at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. R21 could soon be available in much larger quantities. Like RTS,S, R21 requires multiple initial doses and a later booster. Both vaccines induce immunity with a protein from the Plasmodium parasite that causes malaria. But the new vaccine contains a different...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research