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A year after the World Health Organization (WHO) recommended a first malaria vaccine, there is now much hope for a second. The results of a clinical trial are published this Thursday, September 8, in the medical journal The Lancet and they are promising.
Between 80% and 70% efficacy, depending on the protocol, the figures published in the review The Lancet (in English) are promising. Concretely, these are the results observed after the administration of a booster of the antimalarial vaccine, the R21 Matrix-M vaccine, developed by scientists at the University of Oxford.
450 children aged 5 to 17 months
A reminder that came almost a year after three first injections as part of a phase 2 of a clinical trial conducted in Burkina Faso, involving 450 children aged 5 to 17 months. These encouraging results, if they still have to be validated by a larger phase 3, however already confirm the interest of this product with better results even than that developed by the GSK laboratory, the first of its kind, recommended by the WHO, which only shows 60% effectiveness.
Fast production
According to the co-author of the study, this R21 Matrix-M vaccine has another advantage: it could indeed be produced quickly in large quantities, enough to hope for a 70% reduction in malaria-related deaths by 2030. These The latter still remain very high, in 2020, 627,000 people died from it, mostly children under the age of five, almost entirely in Africa.
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