BioNTech prepares a vaccine against malaria: after helping with Covid, the mRNA technique wants to put an end to the most deadly diseases

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Mrna
biontech prepares a vaccine against malaria: after helping with covid,

BioNTech, the German company that collaborates with Pfizer on one of the Covid-19 vaccines, announced this week that it is preparing a vaccine against one of the world’s deadliest diseases: malaria.

It will not be the first, since Mosquirix has already been tested since 2019. However, this current four-dose vaccine offers only 30% protection. Clearly insufficient for a disease that claims more than 400,000 lives a year, according to data from the World Health Organization.

The mRNA technique opens up a world of possibilities

Mrna

In April 2021, a vaccine from the University of Oxford promised to be 75% effective. The first to offer this level of protection, since to date, the most effective was 55% in trials with children in Africa. The Serum Institute of India, which makes this new vaccine, is confident of delivering 200 million doses if it gets approval from regulatory bodies.

These percentages are also far from what the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine offers, for example, with an efficacy of 95% against Covid-19 after two doses. BioNTech now prepares its ‘Malaria Project’, with the aim of developing a “well-tolerated and highly effective” malaria vaccine.

The first step in this project will be to develop an mRNA vaccine that transmits immunity against malaria for a long time. To do this, they will use the messenger RNA technique that has proven to be so effective with the Covid-19 vaccine. Among the options they handle in this pre-clinical research phase is targeting the circumsporozoite protein (CSP), as well as newly discovered antigens.

“BioNTech intends to develop the first mRNA vaccine for the prevention of malaria,” says the company of award-winning scientists UÄŸur Åžahin and Özlem Türeci. The initial trial is planned to late 2022 and if promising results are achieved, it would confirm the theory that the mRNA technique to produce vaccines is one of the great milestones of medicine in recent years.

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There is so much confidence that large-scale production is already being considered

Biontech

BioNTech has among its plans to manufacture this vaccine against malaria on a large scale, despite all of it. The malaria vaccine it is at an early stage and “there is no guarantee of success”, but believes that “this is the perfect time to tackle this challenge.”

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