Posted September 08, 2018 08:03:50 A drug-resistance variant of malaria that causes a milder form of the disease has been developed by a British pharmaceutical company.
The company, called Medicines for Life, is developing the drug in collaboration with British researchers and scientists at Oxford University.
The development of the drug has been led by Dr Richard Molyneux, head of pharmaceuticals at Oxford.
He told Newsweek the vaccine was expected to be ready for clinical trials in 2018.
The variant of the malaria parasite that causes the disease is resistant to other drugs, including some of the drugs currently used to treat it, which could mean the vaccine could have an impact in a very short time.
Molyneaux said he was confident the vaccine would be “extremely safe” and would not cause side effects.
He said the vaccine did not contain the genes for resistance, so patients should be able to develop resistance to the drug if the vaccine were not effective.
However, he cautioned against overusing the vaccine.
“The most effective drug against malaria is a vaccine,” he said.
“We need to make sure we don’t make too many of them.”
Molynguys company is working on several vaccines for the parasite, including one that would target the parasite’s genetic make-up.
Dr Molynguev said the first vaccine would target a protein called CTL1.
This is an enzyme that helps to break down the parasite and is important in the parasite becoming more infectious.
The second vaccine would have two proteins called CML3 and CML6, which together form a “coding sequence” for the gene that causes malaria.
The third vaccine would use a synthetic variant of CTL3 that would bind to a protein found in the surface of the parasite that’s known to be involved in the development of malaria parasites.
The drug that could be made was a variant of a malaria parasite drug called p-glycoprotein, which is being developed by Pfizer.
The Oxford team has published its results in the journal Nature Immunology.
The drugs developed by the Oxford team have been tested in mice and a human trial has been launched, and Dr Molyeneux said it was expected that the drug would be ready to be tested on humans by 2018.
Dr Michael Beggs, a researcher at the Oxford University Centre for Biotechnology, said the drug was being developed to address a major problem in the fight against malaria.
“It’s really good news for us as we’re working on malaria in the future and it could really help us reduce the burden of malaria on people,” he told Newsweek.
Dr Beggg said the team had been working for years to develop an effective vaccine, but it was not clear if the new variant would work.
“One thing that we do know is that we’ve got a very good gene-based vaccine, and if we can isolate that gene and try to produce a drug with it that’s really effective, that would be really great,” he added.
Dr John Fauci, the head of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said it had been encouraging to see companies like Medicines For Life working to develop new vaccines.
“I think the drug-antigen drug is a good step forward, and we’ll continue to see more companies working on the next generation of vaccines as we see more effective ways of tackling this problem,” he wrote in an email to Newsweek.
The Lancet article, “A drug-based malaria vaccine that can be tested against malaria” was published on Monday, September 08.