A malaria vaccine developed by Britain’s Oxford University is to be used in Ghana, the first time it has received regulatory clearance anywhere in the world.
Professor Adrian Hill, chief investigator of the R21/Matrix-M vaccine programme and director of the university’s Jenner Institute, said it marked the “culmination of 30 years of malaria vaccine research at Oxford with the design and provision of a high efficacy vaccine that can be supplied at adequate scale to the countries who need it most”.
Last September, Oxford announced that a booster dose of the new malaria vaccine maintained a high level of protection against the disease, expressing hopes that the inexpensive injection could be produced on a large scale in a matter of years.
The international research team suggested the vaccine could represent a turning point in the fight against the mosquito-borne parasitic disease, which killed 627,000 people — mostly African children — in 2020 alone.