Vaccine candidate provides two years of protection in young children when boosted, but larger trials are needed before it can be rolled out.
The findings offer hope that the vaccine, called R21, could be an effective weapon in the fight against malaria, which is one of the biggest killers of children globally.
But public-health officials will require results from a bigger trial — with more than ten times as many participants, spread across four African countries — before they can confirm R21’s safety and utility, and roll it out on a larger scale. “There is still more work to be done,” says Matshidiso Moeti, the WHO’s regional director for Africa, who is based in Brazzaville in the Republic of the Congo. “But I think this is very positive news.
So far, the only one shown to be successful is a vaccine called RTS,S produced by London-based pharma giant GSK. After decades of development, RTS,S was approved by the WHO on 6 September for broad use in regions with significant malaria transmission. It has been administered to more than 800,000 children in Ghana, Kenya, and Malawi, and is about 70% effective at preventing malaria in children when combined with conventional antimalarial drugs.
Results awaited from a larger trial of 4,800 children in four African countries, including two in which malaria is a year-round threat, could address that concern and solidify R21’s unblemished safety record. Hill’s team is analysing the data from that trial and hopes to update the WHO on the results by the end of September.The key to R21’s impact on malaria might lie not just in its effectiveness, but also in its availability, says Hill.
“Supply here is a real strength,” said Hill, who also noted that he expects R21 to be sold at less than half the price of RTS,S. “We hope that this will be deployed and available and saving lives certainly by the end of next year.”
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