How much progress has been made producing a vaccine for malaria?
AH: Malaria’s a good example of something that’s very difficult to make a vaccine for and where lots of different vaccine concepts have to be tested. That’s where research and academia comes in and we can try a whole variety of different vaccine approaches to try and find out what would be best, and of course it is difficult because we have no vaccines that work against any parasitic disease of humans, but malaria is showing the most signs of progress in that we have vaccines that are now protecting a significant number of people in clinical trials, not enough, but we are rapidly improving those vaccines so in phase II trials we can see some efficacy in over half the people with two completely different types of vaccine today. Q: Is research on malaria adequately funded considering the number of people affected compared to degenerative illnesses of the rich world? AH: For years people have debated the big problem of how you incentivize, particularly companies, to invest in Malaria vacc
