Strategic approaches taken by MVI

MVI is coordinating its efforts with malaria vaccine programs at various organizations and agencies around the world, identifying opportunities in current vaccine development efforts, and applying its resources to advance promising malaria vaccine candidates.

This approach is based on several key assumptions about the malaria vaccine field:

• A strong foundation of malaria research already exists;
• Progress along the malaria vaccine development pathway will be measurable;
• Current market forces requiring a return on investment cannot drive malaria vaccine development alone, requiring a balance of push and pull mechanisms for success; and
• Effective disease prevention will ultimately require combination vaccines that include several antigens from different stages of the Plasmodium life cycle and elicit a breadth of immune responses.

Given the existing malaria vaccine development participants, activities, and environment, MVI has determined it can be most effective by seeking opportunities, seizing those that present themselves, and collaborating with a variety of partners.

MVI's strategy also focuses on vaccine development rather than discovery, adopting an industrial model of management, ensuring that MVI funding translates into a net increase in funding for malaria vaccine development, and working on different approaches simultaneously rather than one at a time, further speeding up the overall process. This includes pursuing development of candidate vaccines that employ different platform technologies or target different antigens thought to be critical for generating a protective immune response.

MVI will focus primarily on vaccines against Plasmodium falciparum, but will also undertake a smaller effort against Plasmodium vivax. While Plasmodium falciparum is responsible for most of the mortality from malaria, which occurs in Africa, infection in other parts of the world is often mixed, and effective disease prevention will require immunity against both falciparum and vivax malaria.

Projects supported by MVI will meet high standards for both product and trial quality and ethics.

A Strategic Advisory Council composed of highly respected individuals in the vaccine field provides MVI with overall programmatic and strategic guidance. MVI seeks technical input on individual projects from Technical Advisory Groups (TAGs). Each TAG is constituted to provide advice on the specific vaccine strategy, drawing from a global panel of experts in vaccine development, malaria, pharmaceutical production, project management, regulatory affairs, and clinical trials.