Promising results – malaria vaccine is now approved in Ghana

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The university said in a statement that a malaria vaccine developed by British company Oxford has been approved for use in Ghana. The hope is that we will eventually save hundreds of thousands of lives.

Ghana is the first in the world to approve the new vaccine, which is given to children between the ages of five and 36 months, the group most at risk of dying from malaria.

The university hopes this will be the first critical step in making the vaccine widely available to African children.

Professor Adrian Hill describes the announcement as the culmination of 30 years of work at the university to develop “a highly effective vaccine that can be produced on a scale suitable for the countries that need it most”.

Promising results in studies

The vaccine has shown promising results in clinical studies among young children, with a 77 percent protection against the disease, which kills more than 600,000 people each year, most of them children.

Pharmaceutical giant GSK received another WHO-recommended malaria vaccine last year, which has been administered to 1 million children. But this vaccine has a 60 percent protection rate, and it drops significantly over time despite the booster dose.

The difficulty in developing an effective malaria vaccine is due, among other things, to the fact that the malaria parasite goes through several stages during its life cycle. So the parasite changes when it enters the human body. When developing a malaria vaccine, researchers must decide which part of the parasite’s life cycle the vaccine should target.