Malaria vaccine from Oxford covid-19 team is most effective ever made

A malaria vaccine shown to be 77 per cent effective in trials – the highest level ever achieved – offers hope of controlling a disease that kills an estimated 400,000 people each year, many of them children.

Adrian Hill at the University of Oxford and his colleagues hope it can be approved for use within the next two years, building on the speed and lessons learned through the rapid development of covid-19 vaccines – the researchers also work on the Oxford/AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine.

“With the commitment by our commercial partner, the Serum Institute of India, to manufacture at least 200 million doses annually in the coming years, the vaccine has the potential to have a major public health impact if licensure is achieved,” he told the PA news agency.

Hill hopes the vaccine will be swiftly approved following final trial results, which he expects the team to report next year.

“Malaria killed at least four times as many more people in Africa last year as covid did,” he said. “Nobody for a moment questioned whether covid should have an emergency use review and authorisation in Africa – of course it did, very quickly. So why shouldn’t a disease that firstly kills children rather than older people, certainly killed an awful lot more, be prioritised for emergency use authorisation in Africa?”

The first scientific report for a malaria vaccine was published in 1910, the first trial of a malaria vaccine took place in the 1940s, and 140 malaria vaccines have gone into clinical testing. Hill said there had been no shortage of effort, but it had just been incredibly difficult. “I’ve been working on malaria vaccines since 1994 – it is not 111 years but sometimes it feels a bit like that,” he said.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has set a target of 75 per cent efficacy by 2030 for a malaria vaccine, and the new vaccine is the first to achieve that level. “This is great, fantastic. We saw the first look at these results after six months last year and we were, we were thrilled,” said Hill.

Charlemagne Ouedraogo, minister of health in Burkina Faso, told PA: “Malaria is one of the leading causes of childhood mortality in Africa. We have been supporting trials of a range of new vaccine candidates in Burkina Faso and these new data show that licensure of a very useful new malaria vaccine could well happen in the coming years.”

The randomised, controlled, double-blind trial was conducted at the Clinical Research Unit of Nanoro and the Research Institute of Health Sciences, Burkina Faso.

There were 450 participants, aged between 5 months and 17 months, who were split into three groups, with the first two groups receiving either a low dose or a high dose of the vaccine candidate. The third group received a rabies vaccination as the control group. Doses were administered from early May 2019 to early August 2019, largely prior to the peak malaria season.

The study reports a vaccine efficacy of 77 per cent in the higher-dose group, and 71% in the lower-dose group, over 12 months of follow-up. Researchers didn’t note any serious adverse events related to the vaccine.

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