With the European Medicine Agency recommending GSK’s malaria vaccine candidate for licensing its use in babies in Africa last week, the hope of the first vaccine to check this deadly disease may become a reality. The vaccine, called RTS, S or Mosquirix, was under development by GSK in partnership with the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative for some years. Vaccine’s efficacy is believed to have assessed separately at each of the clinical trial sites representing a wide range of malaria transmission settings. The development of the vaccine, part-funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, will now have to be assessed by the World Health Organisation and it should be available in the market before the end of this year. Malaria reported to have killed an estimated 584,000 people in 2013 and the vast majority of these deaths occurred in sub-Saharan Africa. More than 80 per cent of malaria deaths are in children under the age of five. This high death rate in infants and children has been causing serious concern among healthcare experts and WHO for years as the existing anti malarial drugs proved to be mostly ineffective. It is after nearly half a century a new medicine was invented by the pharmaceutical industry for countering the ever growing threat of malaria in the world. Chloroquin, was the last drug brought out by the global pharmaceutical industry for the treatment of malaria in 1947. This and other drugs launched later are found to be ineffective on majority of malaria affected patients worldwide. Despite such continuing misery in these poor countries, no serious attempt has been made by the multinational drug companies to find a new molecule for treating or preventing malaria.
According to the WHO’s World Malaria Report 2013, deaths caused by malaria came down by 42 per cent globally between 2000 and 2012 and the incidence of malaria decreased by 25 per cent during the same period. But what is worrying the health experts is that the gains achieved in malaria eradication during this period may get reversed due to a steady rise in parasite resistance to drugs, mosquito resistance to insecticides and re-emergence of transmission in places where the disease has been already eliminated. Emergence of artemisinin resistance in Cambodia, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam is a serious issue in this regard. Artemisinin-based combination treatment is currently the first line treatment for the most lethal type of malaria, Plasmodium falciparum, and resistance to this drug is already endangering the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. Another threat lies in the fact that the Anopheles mosquitoes carrying malaria parasites are increasingly become resistant to insecticides. Health experts, therefore, wonder whether the GSK vaccine would really work to eliminate the scourge from the face of the earth or it could be effective only in case of children. If that is the case, pharmaceutical industry will have to continue their research for an ultimate remedy for the disease.