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The Oxford team that produced a successful coronavirus vaccine is about to enter the final stage of human trials in its quest for an inoculation against malaria.
The director of the Jenner Institute, Professor Adrian Hill, said the malaria vaccine will be tested on 4,800 children in Africa next year after the first studies yielded promising results.
In an interview with the Times, Hill said malaria is a public health emergency.
More than 400,000 people a year die from the disease, and in Africa a child under five dies every two minutes.
“This year in Africa many more people will die from malaria than will die from Covid. I don’t mean twice as much, probably 10 times, “Hill said. The vaccine” will be available in very large quantities, it works quite well. And it will be very cheap. “
The vaccine could be in use by 2024 if the final human trials are successful, he said. It’s considered a potentially huge breakthrough, as no vaccine is fully licensed for malaria despite a century of research. GSK is the only pharmaceutical company to have come close, but its product was only 30% effective.
The institute’s coronavirus vaccine is also set to be affordable and available on a large scale in developing countries. Jab trials will begin next year in Burkina Faso, Kenya, Tanzania and Mali. The first phase 2 studies look good so far and Oxford has teamed up with the Serum Institute in India to produce the doses.
It comes as the Oxford / AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine awaits regulatory approval for use in the UK. The Oxford researchers announced that their vaccine was 62% effective in most volunteers, compared to more than 90% for those made by Pfizer and Moderna.
The researchers said, however, that a subset of the volunteers had been mistakenly given a lower dose of the vaccine due to manufacturing problems, and that a lower dose resulted in about 90% greater effectiveness. They had no explanation for the anomaly.
“The Covid-19 pandemic has shown the extent to which the world remains threatened by infectious diseases,” Azra Ghani, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at Imperial College London, told the Times. “A highly effective vaccine against malaria could have a significant impact in reducing this risk.”
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