WHO ‘rainbow tables’ on malaria vaccine projects updated

01 December 2011

The World Health Organisation – Initiative for Vaccine Research (IVR) has published an update of its malaria ‘rainbow’ tables, an overview of malaria vaccine projects on 28 November 2011. The information is collected with the help of malaria vaccine funding agencies, individual investigators and groups, and the tables represent the “most complete publicly available summary of malaria vaccine projects at advanced pre-clinical and clinical stages globally”. Two EDCTP-funded projects are included in the overview: the GMZ2 field study and the MVVC study. 

The GMZ2 study, led by Dr Dawit Ejigu from the African Malaria Network Trust (AMANET), aims to develop a promising candidate malaria vaccine GMZ2 (Hybrid combination of GLURP and MSP3), taking it through Phase Ib clinical trial in Gabonese children, and multi-centre Phase IIb trials in Burkina Faso, Gabon, Ghana and Uganda. The trial is proceeding according to plan and all sites have completed recruitment and now follow-up of the volunteers continues.

The Malaria Vectored Vaccine Consortium (MVVC), led by Dr Egeruan Babatunde Imoukhuede, conducts a clinical trial of AdCh63/MVA ME-TRAP. The candidate vaccine antigen ME-TRAP acts at the liver stage, while AdCh63 and Modified Virus Ankara (MVA) are the vectors for this vaccine which is administered with the prime-boost strategy. Pre-clinical studies as well as completed and ongoing phase I clinical trials have found recombinant adenoviruses to be the most effective means of inducing strong CD8 T cell responses that are known to be protective against liver-stage malaria. These immune responses may be enhanced by a boosting immunisation with the increasingly widely used MVA vector. These trials will evaluate the efficacy of a particularly potent prime-boost combination of an adenovirus vector followed by an MVA vector in preventing clinical malaria.

Only projects at the pre-clinical and clinical stages are included in the rainbow tables, according to the following criteria: “pre-clinical projects are intended to represent only projects which are at a serious pre-clinical process development stage with a reasonably high chance of reaching clinical evaluation. Projects listed as clinical have begun immunizations of the first study participants and those listed as discontinued had previously been under clinical evaluation”.

The task of the WHO IVR is to “guide, provide vision, enable, support, and facilitate the development, clinical evaluation and world-wide access to safe, effective and affordable vaccines against infectious diseases of public health importance, especially in developing countries”. It concentrates specifically on developing and promoting a “global and sustainable R&D pipeline delivering the optimal cost-effective vaccines for IVR priority diseases”.

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