BioNTech Develops Malaria Vaccine With COVID-19 Vaccine Technology

Illustration of malaria management in Angola. (Wikimedia Commons/USAID Africa Bureau)

JAKARTA - German pharmaceutical group BioNTech, which developed the first coronavirus vaccine with US company Pfizer, is preparing to conduct clinical trials for a safe and effective malaria vaccine by the end of next year.

According to World Health Organization (WHO) data, there were an estimated 229 million cases of malaria globally in 2019, with around 409.000 deaths that year.

From this data, WHO estimates that children under five accounted for around 67 percent of deaths due to malaria in 2019 for the age category. Meanwhile, for the regional distribution category, 94 percent of cases and deaths due to malaria are in Africa.

"We are already working on HIV and tuberculosis, and malaria is the third major indication (of a disease) with a high unmet medical need", said BioNTech Chief Executive Ugur Sahin, quoted by Sky News Tuesday, July 27.

Illustration of malaria the mosquito Anopheles albimanus that causes malaria. (Wikimedia Commons/James Gathany)

"It has an unusually high number of infected people every year, a number of patients dying, very severe disease and high mortality in young children", Sahin said.

However, Sahin admits the project is still in its early stages and there is no guarantee of success. Nevertheless, he expressed his company's beliefs.

Sahin said his company believed it was "the right time to tackle this challenge", because of the insights gained from developing an mRNA vaccine against COVID-19.

To note, malaria is a parasitic infection that is transmitted to the victim through the bite of an infected mosquito, which is not recognized by the immune system. Later, according to Sahin, the vaccine developed aims to make parasites visible and can be attacked.

BioNTech is planning to run tests of a tuberculosis vaccine by 2020, as well as nine other vaccines against nine different infectious diseases.

There is currently only one malaria vaccine, Mosquirix, which took several years to develop by GlaxoSmithKline. However, the effectiveness of this vaccine has only reached 39 percent.

"The genome of Plasmodium, the parasite that causes malaria, is more complex than that of a virus", said Prakash Srinivasan, assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Separately, researchers at Oxford's Jenner Institute are also developing a potential new malaria vaccine that has shown promise in a year-long trial.