Malaria Vaccine

This could save a lot of lives. [Link]

A vaccine with a 53 percent success rate doesn’t normally call for a celebration. But when that means protecting one in every two African children from a disease that kills a kid every 30 seconds, those odds start looking better. “The impact is tremendous,” says Joe Cohen, inventor of the first malaria vaccine. “We could save hundreds of thousands of kids every year.”

This spring, pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline will enroll 16,000 infants and toddlers, the groups most at risk, in what could be the largest malaria-vaccine trial to date in Africa, setting up labs in 11 hospitals in Kenya, Burkina Faso, Malawi and four other countries. The test follows on the success of recent small-scale studies in Kenya and Tanzania that reduced infection by 65 percent in infants. “We’re going to make sure the vaccine works everywhere in sub-Saharan Africa,” says Cohen, vice president of R&D for Vaccines for Emerging Diseases and HIV at GSK. If this final clinical trial replicates the results of previous studies, the company hopes to submit the vaccine for regulatory approval in 2011, with the ultimate goal of including it in the World Health Organization’s free infant-immunization program, which covers measles, tuberculosis and other diseases.