Wednesday 9 October 2013

Malaria Vaccine To Be Commercially Available Soon



From test trial, the world’s first vaccine to tackle
malaria, a disease that threatens the life of about
3.3 billion worldwide, will soon be available in
commercial quantity for the treatment of the
disease.
British drug maker, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), is seeking regulatory approval to produce the
malaria vaccine for sale, after trial data showed
that it had cut the number of cases in African
children.
Experts Tuesday welcomed the bid, saying they
are optimistic about the possibility of the world's first vaccine being deployed to tame malaria, after
the trial results.
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO)
, malaria, a mosquito-borne parasitic disease, kills
hundreds of thousands of people worldwide
yearly, with an estimated 219 million cases of the disease reported in 2010, causing an estimated
660,000 deaths.
But scientists said an effective vaccine was crucial
to attempts to eradicate the disease instead of the
drug regimen being used now to fight it.
The vaccine known as RTS,S was found to have almost halved the number of malaria cases in
young children in the trial and to have reduced by
about 25 per cent the number of malaria cases in
infants.
GSK is developing RTS,S with the non-profit Path
Malaria Vaccine Initiative (MVI), supported by funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Researchers found out that the vaccine, which is
being developed in the US, protected 12 out of 15
patients from the disease, when given in high
doses.
The method is unusual because it involves injecting live but weakened malaria-causing
parasites directly into patients to trigger
immunity.
"Many millions of malaria cases fill the wards of
our hospitals," said Halidou Tinto, a lead
investigator on the RTS,S trial from Burkina Faso. "Progress is being made with bed nets and other
measures, but we need more tools to battle this
terrible disease,” Tinto added.
The malaria trial was Africa's largest-ever clinical
exercise involving almost 15,500 children in
seven countries. The findings were presented at a medical meeting
in Durban, South Africa

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