After decades of disappointing results, recent findings have revived hopes for an effective vaccine against malaria, which kills some 400,000 people every year, most of them children. An experimental vaccine that targets the most dangerous form of the malaria parasite was found to have an efficacy of 74% to 77% after 1 year in children from West Africa.
The results come from a small trial of a vaccine developed by researchers at the University of Oxford’s Jenner Institute involving 450 toddlers in Burkina Faso, where malaria is endemic.
“The efficacy we have got has never been obtained by any [malaria] vaccine candidate. These are really amazing findings,” says Halidou Tinto, a parasitologist at the Institute for Health Sciences Research in Nanoro, Burkina Faso, and a principal investigator at the site of the study. Its findings are in press at The Lancet and were posted 20 April on its preprint server.
Pedro Alonso, director of the World Health Organization (WHO) Global Malaria Programme, who was not involved with the work, calls it “very positive news.” But he adds: “This is a trial with 450 children. … We are still quite far away from having the type of information that would allow us to get very excited.”
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So, y'know, too early to go getting very excited, but this could turn out to be a very big deal.