'We could eradicate malaria by 2040' says expert after revolutionary vaccine is approved by WHO

• Trials have shown that the R21/Matrix vaccine, developed by Oxford University together with the Serum Institute of India, reduces malaria by up to 75%.
• The Conversation Weekly spoke to chief investigator Adrian Hill, who is also director of the Jenner Institute at the University of Oxford, about this revolutionary vaccine.

Why is the R21/Matrix vaccine a game-changer?

• The best vaccine prior to this was about 50% over a year, and lower than that over three years.
• The big difference is how you can manufacture it at a scale that is really needed to protect most of the children who need a malaria vaccine in Africa.
• There are about 40 million children born every year in malaria areas in Africa who would benefit from a vaccine.

Why has developing a malaria vaccine been so difficult?

• Malaria is not a virus, it’s not a bacterium.
• This is one of the reasons that malaria is super complex.
• If you can get a really good vaccine for one of those, you will break the cycle of transmission.
• It’s a silent infection until it gets into the blood and starts multiplying inside your red blood cells.
• So the sporozoite is a natural target to try and kill the parasite before it multiplies very quickly.

Tell us about past attempts to develop a malaria vaccine

• In about 1943, there was a trial of the whole malaria parasite vaccine candidate in New York with zero efficacy.
• And then within 10 years we had 5,000 candidates because everyone hoped that the gene they had sequenced might be a malaria vaccine.

Why aren’t vaccines for whole parasites effective against malaria?

• It’s the same reason that just getting infected once by malaria doesn’t give you protection against the next infection.
• In the areas of malaria where we test our vaccines in Africa, some children get up to eight episodes in three or four months.
• They get quite unwell with the first and three weeks later they’re having a second bout and so on.

Will we ever eradicate malaria entirely?

• Malaria is very high on the list of diseases we want to eradicate.
• I don’t think it’s going to happen in five years or 10 years, but it should happen in something like 15 years.