update 2 on November 05, 2008

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has made a grant of US$4.8M to The University of North Carolina Vaccine Institute at Chapel Hill to create and test a host of anti-Dengue vaccines.  The Institute will pare down that list to the best prospects, which will then be forwarded to the University of Puerto Rico’s Medical Sciences Campus for further testing.  The researchers will be pushing for either a monovalent (targeting one Dengue virus) or tetravalent (targeting all four serotypes) vaccine during the testing phase to be undertaken at Puerto Rico.

Monovalent vaccines are limited in scope when taken in the context that a patient who becomes infected with one virus type is somehow placed at a greater risk of developing hemorrhagic complications, if infected with any one of the other three viruses.   Why that is so is not yet fully understood.

Laura White, Ph.D., research assistant professor in microbiology and immunology in the School of Medicine and a member of the institute, is hoping that their research comes up with at least a monovalent vaccine, for it would improve their understanding of how the viruses work and place them in a better position to formulate a vaccine that would offer full protection against the four viruses. (Source: UNC Health Care)

All indications are that emphasis will be placed on the development of a pediatric Dengue vaccine to protect infants and small children, the ones who are most susceptible to the hemorrhagic complications of the disease.

Not to be outdone, world leaders and philanthropists meeting at the United Nations in New York in September have pledged another US$3B to fight Malaria as one way of mitigating world poverty. The donors – the World Bank, the Global Fund to fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, the British government and private charitable organizations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – hope that this money will achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) by the established deadline of 2015.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has joined the Presidents of Rwanda and Tanzania to give assurances that not only are the goals achievable, but that the anti-Malaria efforts are already working.  Take Rwanda for example. Malaria deaths have already fallen by more than 60% in that country, according to Paul Kagame, the Rwandan President.

The Global Malaria Action Plan (Gmap) will be the first project to benefit from this infusion of cash. Gmap is projected to save millions of lives in the next three years and 4.2 million lives by 2015 thus setting the stage for the complete eradication of Malaria in Africa.

Another US$11 million has been approved for disbursement by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to eight organizations in seven African countries to assist them in expanding their malaria prevention and control activities.

This money, courtesy of the President’s Malaria Initiative (PMI) through its Malaria Communities Program (MCP), will benefit infant children and pregnant women in Malawi, Liberia, Senegal, Ghana, Ethiopia, Uganda and Angola.  The PMI is led by the USAID with key partners in the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). (Source: African Press Agency via Africa Fighting Malaria)

Donation scorecard:

  • British Department for Development Funding: US$73.5M for the Affordable Medicines Facility for Malaria; 5M a year for Malaria Research Funding; and 20M mosquito bednets;
  • World Bank; US$1.1B;
  • Global Fund to Fight Aids, TB and Malaria: US$1.6B;
  • Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: US$168.7M for the Malaria Vaccine Initiative’s research into a new generation of Malaria vaccines;
  • USAID: US$11 million for new US partners in Africa to undertake community-based Malaria prevention and treatment activities and to build local ownership of Malaria control;