Developing a malaria vaccine

Malaria has posed a particular challenge to vaccine researchers with efforts to make an impactful vaccine dating back over a century. In 2024 two malaria vaccines will be rolled out for the first time but at hugely different scales. The vaccine designed and originally developed at Oxford, R21 in the adjuvant Matrix-M, has been approved more recently and has high efficacy as well as a significantly lower price. The seminar will review the development of this vaccine over the last ten years and consider prospects for further developments in the malaria vaccine field aiming for eventual malaria eradication.  

Professor Adrian V. S. Hill KBE FRS is the Director and Founder of the Jenner Institute, and Mittal Professor of Vaccinology at Oxford University. In partnership with the Serum Institute of India and AstraZeneca the Jenner Institute developed rapidly a ChAdOx1 vector-based SARS-CoV-2 vaccine which saved an estimated 6.2 million lives in 2021 alone. His lab has also designed a new malaria vaccine, R21/Matrix-M, which has recently shown unprecedented high efficacy in a phase III trial in four African countries.