The researchers recruited volunteers from 13 Gambian villages that were close to the alluvial flood plain and so were at high risk of developing malaria. They randomly assigned the 372 volunteers to receive either two doses of the malaria vaccine or three doses of rabies vaccine, which acted as a control. This three-dose schedule is similar to the one used by the World Health Organization/United Nations Children's Fund Expanded Program on Immunization.
The time to first infection was similar in the two groups, with an estimated vaccine efficacy of only 10%. However, the immune response, measured one week after the third vaccination, was 80 times higher in the DNA/MVA vaccine group than in the rabies vaccine group.
"It is absolutely crucial that results like these are published, since the failures, as well as the successes, need to be documented if we are to move towards rational strategies for optimizing malaria vaccines," says Tom Smith from the Swiss Tropical Institute, who was not involved in the study. "At the same time, it makes sense to move on quickly without shedding too many tears, in a field that is moving much faster than it was before the recent injections of money from the Gates Foundation, but where it is still impossible to second-guess the results of field trials. This is partly because we do not have any good proxy measures of effective immunity in P. falciparum, and partly because this is a fertile area for trying out new techniques, such as DNA vaccines, where there is still a lot to learn."
Hill is planning to do further trials that address the important question of whether this type of vaccine can prevent the symptoms of malaria. "The next step," says Hill, "is to assess newer vaccine regimes that employ two viral vectors rather than DNA and to study prevention of malaria rather than infection."
Citation: Moorthy VS, Imoukhuede EB, Milligan P, Bojang K, Keating S, et al (2004) A randomised, controlled, double-blind efficacy trial of DNA/MVA ME-TRAP prime-boost immunisation against malaria infection in Gambian adults. PLoS Med 1 (2): e33.
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