In the middle of a new pandemic, it’s all too easy to forget older epidemics that have killed and continue to kill millions, with poor drug therapies and a weak vaccine.
Scientists at the University of Oxford, which already helped develop—alongside AstraZeneca—a COVID-19 vaccine, are now hoping to change that. This week it released new data showing its malaria vaccine had a 77% efficacy, the first time in a controlled trial such a shot has hit over the World Health Organization’s threshold of achieving 75% efficacy or more.
Malaria has blighted the world for millennia; in the previous century alone, the parasitic disease coming from mosquitoes claimed between 150 million and 300 million lives, accounting for 2% to 5% of all deaths. The epidemics are most harshly felt in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, the Amazon basin and other tropical regions.
There is a vaccine, GlaxoSmithKline’s Mosquirix, but its efficacy is low, preventing just 39% of malaria cases. Published in the Lancet, Oxford’s new vaccine, R21, showed up to 77% efficacy in a phase 2b trial of 450 children in Burkina Faso over 12 months.
The young children, all under 18 months old, had three doses and have since had a further booster jab and split over high and lower doses. Efficacy was 77% in the high-dose adjuvant group and 74% in the lower dose group.
Larger trials are now beginning, involving just under 5,000 children in four countries.
Cyrus Poonawalla and Adar Poonawalla, respectively chair and CEO of the Serum Institute, which will manufacture the vaccine, said in a statement that they were “highly excited to see these results on a safe and highly effective malaria vaccine which will be available to the whole world.”
The project was through collaboration with Oxford and also Novavax, which is supplying the adjuvant and also is working on a COVID vaccine of its own.