World Malaria Day 2010
Counting malaria out
A perspective from MVI Director, Dr. Christian Loucq
April 25, 2010 – On this World Malaria Day, we stand at the threshold of unprecedented progress in the fight against malaria, thanks to the continuing efforts and impact of robust public-private collaborations like ours. These collaborations have produced major advances in malaria vaccine development. They have also helped to usher in a decade that promises to realize the global goal of licensing a first-generation malaria vaccine by 2015.
Even as we look forward to meeting—or even beating—that target, MVI has already crafted a strategy that is designed to build on this progress and deliver a next-generation vaccine by 2025. MVI's success will rely, however, on our ability to continue to forge strategic collaborations and on the donor community's ability to fulfill the need for major new investments in malaria research and development (R&D).
This decade is therefore a critical one for the malaria vaccine field. In this regard, we welcome the recent pledge by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to turn it into "the decade of vaccines" and to commit $10 billion toward life-saving products for developing countries. We also strongly echo the Foundation's challenge to other donors to follow suit.
The impact of such investments is clear. In May 2009, MVI, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) Biologicals, together with African research centers and scientists, launched a pivotal, seven-country, efficacy trial of RTS,S—the world's most clinically advanced malaria vaccine candidate—that is expected to involve up to 16,000 African children.
Earlier Phase 2 studies were more than encouraging. They showed that over an eight-month follow-up period, RTS,S reduced the risk of clinical episodes of malaria by 53 percent and had a promising safety and tolerability profile when used with standard infant vaccines. Today, the GSK vaccine candidate, which targets the most deadly form of the malaria parasite (Plasmodium falciparum), stands as the first to have reached a large-scale Phase 3 trial. It also promises to be the first vaccine approved for humans against any parasite.
MVI's newly refined R&D strategy is designed to take the field even farther. Key elements of this forward-looking plan include supporting the development of other kinds of vaccine candidates, such as those that block the transmission of malaria from mosquitoes to humans and those that target the less deadly but more widespread malaria parasite, P. vivax.
More than anything, World Malaria Day allows us to reflect on how far we've come and to focus on the malaria community's concerted effort to control and gradually eliminate a disease that still kills close to one million people each year, almost all of them young children in Africa. A malaria vaccine will be a vital part of that effort.
Our strategic, multi-pronged approach to developing vaccines should help us to achieve the 2025 goal set by the malaria community to develop a product that is at least 80 percent effective against clinical malaria for at least four years. While we realize that more must be done if we hope to achieve the long-term goal of malaria eradication, the progress made in just the past decade gives us the hope and the confidence that it will indeed be possible one day to "count malaria out."
