MALARIA VACCINE

WHY IN NEWS ?

• Recently malaria vaccine developed by Oxford University and Serum Institute of India (SII) has been recommended for large-scale use by the World Health Organization (WHO).
• The R21/Matrix-M ,only the second malaria jab has shown up to 75% efficacy.

ABOUT NEW VACCINE :

• The vaccine was developed using US firm Novavax’s adjuvant technology.
• An adjuvant is a substance added to a jab to boost its immune response.
• The vaccine is shown to be effective in a wide range of settings, from places with high seasonal malaria to ones with perennial transmission.
• While efficacy from three doses waned after a year, a booster shot restored it. Cost is another factor in its favour.
• The $2-4 price tag per dose is comparable to other childhood jabs, enabling quicker scale-up at country-levels.
• The Phase III trials included 4,800 children aged 3-5 years from Burkina Faso, Kenya, Mali and Tanzania.

CHALLENGES IN DEVELOPING MALARIA VACCINES:

• A key reason for the delay is the stumbling blocks in vaccine development for ‘neglected’ diseases such as malaria, even tuberculosis and HIV-AIDS, which largely affect developing and under-developed countries.
• Malaria is not a virus, it’s not a bacterium.
• It’s a protozoan parasite, some thousands of times larger than a typical virus.
• A good measure of that is how many genes it has. COVID-19 has 13, malaria has about 5,500. This is one of the reasons that malaria is super complex.
• For some diseases, the return on investment is lower for vaccine manufacturers, which also translates into large funding shortfalls.
• Malaria, for instance, has a $3.8-billion funding gap globally, each year, according to RBM Partnership, a Switzerland- based non-profit.
• The complex genetic make-up of the parasite that causes malaria has also made the technology difficult to crack.

EXISTING VACCINES AGAINST MALARIA :

• Existing vaccine was developed by GSK, a UK drugmaker, and got approval in 2021.
• The vaccine acts against P. falciparum, the most deadly malaria parasite globally, and the most prevalent in Africa.
• It was engineered using genes from the outer protein of P. falciparum malaria parasite and a portion of a hepatitis B virus plus a chemical adjuvant to boost the immune response.

• However, only 18 million doses are available, to be allocated across 12 African countries over 2023-2025.
• With demand far outstripping the supply, the new vaccine’s scalability makes it an important development to “protect more children faster.

ADVANTAGES OF NEW VACCINE:

• Malaria had 247 million cases globally in 2021, with 619,000 deaths.
• Nearly half a million children, mainly in Africa, die of it each year.
• It’s prevalent in India despite massive strides—cases fell from 338,494 in 2019 to 176,522 in 2022, according to the National Vector Borne Disease Control Programme.

• With SII announcing a capacity of producing over 100 million doses a year (and soon 200 million), the vaccine, along with other public health measures, could aid India’s goal to eliminate malaria by 2030.
• A vaccine is a breakthrough addition to the malaria toolkit and can help get malaria control back on track.
• Children aged under 5 years are the most vulnerable group affected by malaria; in 2019, they accounted for 67% (274,000) of all malaria deaths worldwide.

WAY FORWARD:

• The vaccine is expected to be available globally in mid-2024.
• However, there’s no clarity on its availability in India yet. Indian rules ask for clinical trials to be conducted within the country.
• Broadly, the next immediate steps include completing the WHO prequalification process that assesses the quality, safety and efficacy of medicinal products, which would enable international procurement for a wider rollout.