World’s First Malaria Vaccine Delayed

“The committees agreed that pilot implementations should be the next step with this vaccine”.

WHO also recommended that there should be further trials on the world’s first malaria vaccine against the malaria strain that largely affected Africa. If the children don’t receive the last dose, the vaccine will not notably reduce the chances of contracting malaria.

The vaccine is called RTS, S and requires four doses for effectiveness.

The pilot study should find out if parents will come back to complete the four doses of the vaccine.

In giving Mosquirix, children between five and nine months old should be given three doses and the fourth dose should be administered by age two. Part of that could be down to genetics.

Polio now both injectable and oral vaccines are being used in India. “We hope this will provide the additional information needed about how to best deliver the vaccine in a real-world setting”, a spokeswoman said.

“…[The vaccine] could still save well over a hundred thousand lives every year, [WHO Strategic Advisory Group of Experts, or SAGE, ] Chair Jon Abramson, a pediatrician at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, said at a press conference today”. Each dose costs $5, making a full treatment $20. It could be funded by the GAVI global vaccine alliance, though no decision on this has yet been made.

“If this vaccine is not effective and we use it widely we will have spent a ton of money which could have been better placed”, Abramson said.

Following a large clinical trial that was published earlier this year, RTS, S, also known as Mosquirix, became the first malaria vaccine to be approved by a regulatory agency, when it was given a “positive scientific opinion” by the European Medicines Agency.

There have already been aproximately 214 million new cases of malaria and 438,000 deaths this year. GSK has already pledged to not make a profit from Mosquirix, but instead to mark it up 5% in order to reinvest into more R&D in the area of tropical diseases.