New Delhi, Sept 15: Mosquirix, the only malaria vaccine to receive approval from the World Health Organization (WHO), has shown modest efficacy against symptomatic malaria, which has triggered the need for developing more effective malaria vaccines.

A recent phase 2 clinical trial conducted in Burkina Faso examined the efficacy of the novel malaria vaccine candidate R21/ Matrix-M in children aged 5–17 months after three primary vaccine doses and a fourth booster shot.

The study found that the R21/Matrix-M vaccine candidate demonstrated high efficacy (75%) against first and multiple episodes of symptomatic malaria over the 24-month follow-up period after the administration of three primary doses, Medical News Today reports.

Results from a clinical trial published in 2021 showed that the R21/Matrix-M malaria vaccine candidate had high efficacy against symptomatic malaria in children aged 5–17 months at 12 months following a primary three-dose regimen.

New findings from the same clinical trial recently published in The Lancet indicate that the administration of the booster shot of R21/Matrix-M 12 months after the primary three-dose regimen helped maintain a high efficacy against symptomatic malaria over the 12-month follow-up period after the booster dose.

Dr. Azra Ghani, a professor at Imperial College London, who was not involved in this research has commented that “despite ongoing efforts to reduce the malaria burden — including through the provision of insecticide-treated bed nets, improvement in access to treatment, and chemoprevention — malaria continues to pose an unacceptably high burden, resulting in over 640,000 deaths globally each year, mostly in young children in Africa.”

“These new results demonstrating high sustained efficacy of the R21 malaria vaccine over a 2-year period are therefore very welcome,” says Dr. Ghani.