(Boursier.com) — BioNTech the German pharmaceutical group, announced the launch of phase I of the clinical trial of its malaria vaccine candidate, which uses messenger RNA (mRNA) technology. Trials of this vaccine, dubbed BNT165b1, involve recruiting 60 volunteers with no history of malaria in the United States for evaluation at three dose levels, BioNTech said in a statement.
BNT165b1 is the first vaccine candidate in BioNTech’s malaria project, which aims to develop a highly effective mRNA vaccine and establish vaccine production in Africa. The company said it will initially evaluate different antigens from the malaria parasite over the next few months to select the multi-antigen vaccine candidate for subsequent trials…
Malaria, a parasitic disease transmitted by mosquitoes, kills hundreds of thousands of people a year, mostly infants, in the poorest regions of sub-Saharan Africa. The world’s first and only licensed malaria vaccine, Mosquirixwas developed by GSK after many years of clinical trials in several African countries, but its effectiveness is only about 30%… In addition, a lack of funding and commercial potential has limited the production capacity of GSK.
Messenger RNA is used to instruct cells to make proteins or protein fragments of a pathogen, which stimulates the action of the immune system…
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