Malaria vaccine results face scrutiny

摘要

"Malaria vaccine could save millions of children's lives"; "World's first malaria vaccine works in major trial"; "Malaria vaccine almost here". To judge from last week's headlines, scientists had made a big breakthrough in the long campaign to create a malaria vaccine, proving its effectiveness with interim results from a huge phase Ⅲ clinical trial in Africa1. Yet several leading vaccine researchers, who are critical of the unusual decision to publish partial trial data, argue that the results raise questions about whether the RTS.S/AS01 candidate vaccine can actually win approval. RTS,S has been in development for some 25 years, initially by the US military, and since 2001 by a public-private venture between the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative (MVI) and the drug-maker GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), supported by US$200 million in funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Bill Gates himself announced the interim results at the Gates Malaria Forum in Seattle, Washington. Gates' speech and the MVI's public-relations material were suitably circumspect about the results, but they were "immediately translated into headlines about [reductions] in death and mortality", says Andrew Farlow, an economist at the University of Oxford, UK, who has previously assessed the RTS.S programme2. "But the data are not telling you that at all."