A high-efficacy malaria vaccine is urgently required to reduce the unacceptable malaria burden in Africa and eliminate malaria. An ideal vaccine would target all stages of the parasite’s life-cycle but no such vaccine has reached clinical trials in Africa.

MMVC, will test a multi-stage vaccine in a large phase IIb efficacy trial in West and East African infants. The four components of the vaccine have strong validation in clinical trials.

The four-stage vaccine will include:
i) a Pre-Erythrocytic vaccine, R21 adjuvanted with matrix-M, which has recently shown prominsing results in a challenge trial;
ii) a liver-stage vaccine, which employs adenoviral and MVA vectors that have shown good safety and high efficacy;
iii) a blood-stage vaccine composed by the conserved PfRH5 antigen that induces high-titre cross-strain neutralising antibodies and has shown efficacy in controlled human malaria infection trials;
iv) and a sexual-stage vaccine, with the conserved Pfs25 antigen, multimerised as a nanoparticle thereby enhancing antibody immunogenicity.

MMVC will undertake a tightly co-ordinated series of lead-in trials in 2018-2021 building towards a phase IIb efficacy trial in infants from late 2021 to 2023.
In parallel MMVC will build new capacity to test the ability of the combination vaccine and/or its transmission-blocking component to block human-to-mosquito transmission in African adults, foreseeing the potential use of the combination vaccine in elimination campaigns.

This consortium, comprising very experienced and new African trial sites with leading northern institutions and companies, offers an unprecedented opportunity for rapid development of a deployable high-efficacy multi-stage malaria vaccine.