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The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered

blogs.sciencemag.org

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Re: The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered

#91

Post by mchusma »

jjeaff wrote: post #30
eloff wrote: post #5

What blows me away is in a study group of 734 infants, which benefited from maternal antibodies against malaria, 717 were infected by malaria in the first year of their life. That's nearly 100%, in the first year since birth. That's devastating. The vaccine is showing 77% efficacy in trials in Burkina Faso. That's an ongoing pandemic that makes covid-19 look like a case of the sniffles. Malaria deaths peaked around 9…

Except for the age difference of the victims, those numbers actually make covid seem pretty bad. Covid has hardly been around for a year and is killing 7x as many people a year.

Also, while covid is not done yet, it's probably going to kill in total much less than 100M.

COVID is bad, but in some ways we got lucky because there could have been way worse pandemics that acted more like smallpox or measles.

Re: The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered

#92

Post by cutemonster »

missedthecue wrote: post #66
soperj wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>That's an ongoing pandemic that makes covid-19 look like a case of the sniffles How? There are literally 3 times more deaths in the last year than peak Malaria, and that's only deaths that were actually counted.

Covid's victims are mostly in their 70s and above. Malaria's victims are mostly under 5 years of age. In terms of life-years lost, Malaria is far far worse.

Yes, and, imagine you're 40 years old, and your 75 years old parents die, or your two 5 years old kids

Re: The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered

#93

Post by abeppu »

bullfightonmars wrote: post #85
abeppu wrote: post #73

I vaguely recall people talking about human/malaria co-evolution. And I was of the impression that the malaria parasite was supposed to be good at evading our immune system, and that was part of why vaccines had limited efficacy. If anyone here is educated in this area ... would it be reasonable to expect that the 77% efficacy would decline if such a vaccine were put into widespread use? Like, I know we observe a pat…

There is a key sentence of this article that speaks to this: > This new vaccine (R21) uses a circumsporozoite protein (CSP) antigen – that’s a highly conserved protein of the parasite, involved in several functions as the parasite makes the move from mosquito to human and into different human tissues such as the salivary glands. Circumsporozoite protein is a highly conserved protein meaning that it is a genetic seque…

I see. So the 23% does not suggest that, e.g. there's some minority of parasites that are "immune" already.

Re: The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered

#94

Post by treeman79 »

eloff wrote: post #5

What blows me away is in a study group of 734 infants, which benefited from maternal antibodies against malaria, 717 were infected by malaria in the first year of their life. That's nearly 100%, in the first year since birth. That's devastating. The vaccine is showing 77% efficacy in trials in Burkina Faso. That's an ongoing pandemic that makes covid-19 look like a case of the sniffles. Malaria deaths peaked around 9…

There is an extremely effective treatment.

Millions have perished from being denied it.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB113236412756302115

Re: The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered

#95

Post by yyyk »

lisper wrote: post #67
tgb wrote: post #64

Is it possible to get herd immunity to malaria? Does the parasite have non-human reservoirs (for the non-mosquito part of its lifecycle)?

Yes and yes: https://malariajournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1... https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22215999/

The first link just says people would accept the vaccine. It doesn't get at all to the heart of OP's concern (that the parasite will hide in non-human reservoirs).

Re: The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered

#96

Post by shoto_io »

eloff wrote: post #5

What blows me away is in a study group of 734 infants, which benefited from maternal antibodies against malaria, 717 were infected by malaria in the first year of their life. That's nearly 100%, in the first year since birth. That's devastating. The vaccine is showing 77% efficacy in trials in Burkina Faso. That's an ongoing pandemic that makes covid-19 look like a case of the sniffles. Malaria deaths peaked around 9…

Absolutely. Malaria is the reason why mosquitos are considered the species most dangerous for humans.

Btw, I don't think it's a pandemic since it doesn't affect the entire globe. It's an epidemic, isn't it?

Re: The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered

#97

Post by alimw »

stuff4ben wrote: post #46
User23 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most successful measure was carpet bombing the USA with DDT for years[1]. Most people don't know this now, but malaria used to be endemic in the USA as far north as the border with Canada. DDT's environmental persistence is obviously a double-edged sword, but it made the eradication possible. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/history/elimination_us.htm...

I don't mean to be crass, but why wouldn't that have worked in Africa? Yes DDT is scary bad, but we seem to be doing ok in the US.

The WHO campaign of the late 50s and early 60s very nearly did eradicate malaria globally. Unfortunately, for people living today in those parts of the world where it has resurged, a miss is as good as a mile.

Re: The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered

#98

Post by perardi »

The crux of the vaccine technology:

This new vaccine (R21) uses a circumsporozoite protein (CSP) antigen – that’s a highly conserved protein of the parasite, involved in several functions as the parasite makes the move from mosquito to human and into different human tissues such as the salivary glands. This has been a vaccine ingredient before, such as in the RTS,S vaccine (the first one ever licensed), but R21 has a much higher proportion of CSP assembled into a virus-like particle. It also uses the exact same adjuvant from Novavax (Matrix-M) that they are using in their coronavirus vaccine – you can’t keep a good adjuvant down, and this Chilean-soapbark-based one seems to really kick the immune system up under all circumstances.

Great to see we are managing to develop new vaccine platforms.

Re: The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered

#99

Post by pradn »

perardi wrote: post #98

The crux of the vaccine technology: This new vaccine (R21) uses a circumsporozoite protein (CSP) antigen – that’s a highly conserved protein of the parasite, involved in several functions as the parasite makes the move from mosquito to human and into different human tissues such as the salivary glands. This has been a vaccine ingredient before, such as in the RTS,S vaccine (the first one ever licensed), but R21 has a…

"Chilean-soapbark"! Happy to see an ingredient such as this. One more reason to conserve biodiversity is for useful ingredients like this one.

Re: The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered

#100

Post by DoreenMichele »

perardi wrote: post #98

The crux of the vaccine technology: This new vaccine (R21) uses a circumsporozoite protein (CSP) antigen – that’s a highly conserved protein of the parasite, involved in several functions as the parasite makes the move from mosquito to human and into different human tissues such as the salivary glands. This has been a vaccine ingredient before, such as in the RTS,S vaccine (the first one ever licensed), but R21 has a…

I'm guessing this is likely a large part of why the efficacy is so high.

From what I gather, parasitic infections are hard to vaccinate against at least in part because at least some of them routinely change their protein markers, so it's hard to identify them. It sounds to me like this counters that.

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