Scientists Express New Hope for Malaria Vaccine

Scientists at an international conference on malaria in Yaounde,
Cameroon, have released new findings, which show major progress has
been made in efforts to create a vaccine for the deadly disease. The
vaccine's proponents hope a partnership with donors will make it
available to the world's poor.

Work has been under way on the candidate vaccine, known as RTS,
S-AS02, for more than two decades. But test results presented at the
Pan-African Malaria Conference in Yaounde Tuesday are being touted by
its makers, American-based pharmaceuticals giant GlaxoSmithKline, as a
critical breakthrough.

Results from a study conducted in cooperation with Mozambique's health
ministry published last year showed the vaccine reduced severe malaria
episodes by more than half.

There had been fears that level of effectiveness would fade over time.

Tuesday's results indicate that, 18 months later, the level of
efficacy has indeed dropped, but only very little.

Inventor, Dr. John Cohen says, if the findings hold up, even in its
current form the vaccine could eventually save hundreds of thousands
of lives every year.

"To put things in perspective, you must remember that it is estimated
that between one and three million kids, mainly, die of malaria every
year in the endemic regions. So a vaccine that can protect with a 50
percent efficacy against the severe form of the disease has the
possibility of protecting against many of these deaths," said Dr.
Cohen. He adds that he's now working to make the vaccine even better.

"We will also be reporting at this MIM conference on a potential
improvement of the vaccine, changing a little bit what we call the
formulation," he said. "We will be testing that new formulation in the
field very soon, over the next year or so. And there is, we feel, a
good chance that this formulation will further increase the level of
efficacy of the vaccine."

Work on the vaccine is being funded through a private-public
partnership, pairing money from GlaxoSmithKline with funding from
donor organizations.

The Path Malaria Vaccine Initiative, which is managing the clinical
development, last month received more than $107 million from Microsoft
founder Bill Gates.

Its director, Melinda Moree says this new method of funding drug
research is making headway in the fight against diseases endemic in
the developing world.

"For a lot of these diseases that only affect poor countries, the
industry doesn't really have the reward system in place that
encourages them to work on these things. So, for malaria vaccines, for
many years, very few people were working on them," she said.

Ms. Moree says, if hopes for Dr. Cohen's vaccine do pan out, she hopes
that same level of cooperation will go into making it available to
those that need it most.

"We've got over a million kids a year dying of malaria, 2,000 kids a
day are dying of malaria," she said. "We should be putting more money,
more effort into doing something about this. We just need to do
something to stop these deaths."

RTS, S-AS02 is among several candidate vaccines currently in
development. Several phases of testing remain, but researchers hope it
will be on the market by 2010.

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