Malaria vaccine News

"This is a vaccine developed in Africa by African scientists and we`re very proud," said WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

 A top member of the White House Task Force on Coronavirus has cautioned against arriving at any conclusion right now as tests in this regard are still underway.

As part of the pilot programme, the vaccine known as RTS,S, will be made available to children up to 2 years of age in Malawi.

Researchers, including those from University of Alberta in Canada, tested 647 children in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) between the ages of two months and five years.

Ghana, Kenya and Malawi were chosen because they already run large programmes to tackle malaria, including the use of bed nets, yet still have high numbers of cases.

Researchers at the Australian National University (ANU) announced the breakthrough after they tracked cells and discovered a molecule which kills microbes that infect the liver - such as malaria, Xinhua news agency reported.

The candidate drug, called PfSPZ, provided up to 100 percent protection for 10 weeks in a trial in Germany, although a trial in real life conditions in Mali gave a lower level of defence, they reported in two separate studies.

More than 200 million people a year are infected with malaria and the disease caused the deaths of nearly half a million people worldwide in 2015.

The first-in-human phase 1 study shows a weakened form of the malaria parasite safely activated strong immune responses in 10 healthy volunteers, whose antibodies completely protected mice from malaria infection.

Researchers at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR) have shown that the efficacy of malaria vaccine candidate, RTS,S/AS01, can be improved to approximately 87 per cent, compared with 63 per cent using the current standard regimen.

The new vaccine, known as the PfSPZ Vaccine, gives 55 percent protection for more than one year to a few healthy adults.

Symptoms of malaria include: fever, headache, chills and vomiting.

It was the first time scientists had pinpointed why the immune system fails to develop immunity during malaria infection.

The panel said the Mosquirix or RTS,S vaccine, should be given in three to five different areas with moderate-to-high malaria transmission, reaching up to a million children.

Using new technology, researchers found new biological evidence to help explain why the malaria vaccine candidate RTS,S/AS01 provided only moderate protection among vaccinated children during clinical testing.

An team of researchers has used cutting edge genomic methods to uncover key biological insights that help explain the protective effects of the world's most advanced malaria vaccine candidate, RTS,S/AS01 (RTS,S).

The researchers were hunting for a way of protecting pregnant women from malaria, which can cause huge problems because it attacks the placenta.