Glaxo Malaria Vaccine Cuts Risk by Half

for at Least 15 Months, Study Says

By Simeon Bennett – Jan 13, 2011

GlaxoSmithKline Plc’s experimental malaria vaccine, already shown to cut the risk of children contracting the disease by half after 8 months, was equally effective after 15, a study showed.

Youngsters in Africa who got the shot, called Mosquirix, were 46 percent less likely to contract malaria than those who received a rabies vaccine, according to the study published in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases.

The findings suggest the London-based drugmaker may have succeeded where others have failed in developing the world’s first effective shot against the deadliest mosquito-borne disease. Glaxo expects to have the results of final-stage trials by late this year or early next, Chief Executive Officer Andrew Witty said in October.

“We’ve never had a malaria vaccine get this far in its development and continue to show such promise,” Robert Newman, director of the World Health Organization’s Global Malaria Programme, said in a telephone interview today. “It’s promising and encouraging.”

Malaria infected about 225 million people and killed about 781,000 in 2009, mostly children in sub-Saharan Africa, the Geneva-based WHO said in December. That makes it the world’s third-deadliest infectious disease behind AIDS and tuberculosis.

Researchers including Philip Bejon, from the Kenya Medical Research Institute in Kilifi, Kenya, tested the vaccine on more than 800 children between ages 5 and 17 months in Tanzania and Kenya. The children either received a rabies vaccine or Mosquirix with a so-called adjuvant designed to boost the effect.

New Analysis

An initial analysis, published in December 2008, showed the vaccine cut the number of children infected with malaria by 53 percent after 8 months. The new analysis found “no evidence of waning efficacy,” Bejon and colleagues wrote.

The most common adverse events were pneumonia, fits with fevers and stomach inflammation, with fewer events reported among children who received the malaria vaccine compared with those who got the rabies shot. The researchers are now studying the vaccine in 15,000 infants in seven countries.

Glaxo expects the cost of the vaccine, if successful, to be “the lowest practical cost sustainable over time,” Witty told reporters on a conference call in October. The drugmaker will “price it at the cost of manufacturing, with only a very small return, around 5 percent,” which Witty has pledged to deploy in research for more treatments of neglected tropical diseases.

The study was funded by Glaxo and the Bethesda, Maryland- based PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative, which is in turn sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s richest charity.

Assuming results of the next trial are positive, Glaxo plans to seek regulatory approval for the shot in Europe, Stephen Rea, a spokesman, said in a telephone interview today. The WHO wants to wait for data on the effectiveness of the vaccine after 30 months, due in 2014, before it makes a policy recommendation on the vaccine, Newman said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Simeon Bennett in Singapore at sbennett9@bloomberg.net

January 13, 2011January 14, 2011

Unusual Discovery in South African Orchard

Andrews Bromi, TalkAfrique.com

Is there a faster, cheaper method to pick sweetest oranges in the orchard? Ask a baboon.

A group of baboons in South Africa is being recognized as capable of sniffing out a new, sweeter variety of orange. Their speed and accuracy at gobbling up quickly ripening fruit has led to a discovery of what is believed to be a new type of tangerine.

Alwyn van der Merwe, production director of ALG Estates near Citrusdal, South Africa, said the farm noticed that baboons that come down to the farm from nearby mountains each year always went to feed from a particular tree among the thousands in the orchards. The animals stripped the tree clean of fruit well before others in the orchard were in season, he said.

“At closer inspection we discovered that the brix [sweetness grade] of this particular minneola, a soft citrus variety, was much higher than the rest of the orchard and that it started bearing fruit at least three weeks earlier than expected,” van der Merwe said.

” It was clearly a case of a spontaneous mutation in the orchard, which would have gone unnoticed were it not for the baboons,” van der Merwe is quoted as saying.

Growers have begun grafting shoots from the baboon’s favorite tree onto other root stock and hope to be producing large quantities of the sweeter minneola in a few years.

And he knows the baboons will likely be the first customers.

“I’m sure they will have a feast one day when we produce a whole orchard of these early sweet minneolas,” he said.

January 6, 2011March 6, 2011

African Rats Can Smell Presence of TB Bacteria

An overweight African rat! This is not a phrase that normally evokes feelings of gratitude, but just waits a minute. African Scientists have reported that rats can save lives by sniffing out tuberculosis with accuracy greater than that of a microscope.

The rat in question is the Gambian pouched rats, which are found in most places in Africa. Researchers are training the rats to be able to smell Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacteria that cause TB.

The New York times reports a study conducted in which rats were able to smell the difference between TB bacteria and the other germs found in human sputum sample or phlegm. The rats’ ability to detect TB was as high as 86.6 percent, and their ability to rule it out was over 93 percent!

Most TB tests involve staining a sample of phlegm with a special compound and examining it under a microscope. This 100-year-old method is notoriously unreliable, however — as many as 60 to 80 percent of positive TB cases are undiagnosed, partly because the bacteria are hard to spot unless there are a lot of them in the sample. But the rats were able to sniff them out, detecting 44 percent more positive cases in a head-to-head competition.

Last month, the World Health Organization endorsed a new machine that can provide accurate results within two hours, but it costs $17,000, and each test requires a $17 cartridge. Rats, needless to, come cheap and what a treasure.

Worldwide, TB killed an estimated 1.7 million people in 2009, and 9.4 million people developed active.

The data is still preliminary but encouraging. Eventually, the rats could be used as a first line of detection for the disease

[youtube]ueYRhIV4zGw&feature=player_embedded [/youtube]

December 28, 2010January 1, 2011

Did first humans originate from Afican or Middle East?

Professor Avi Gopher from the Institute of Archeology of Tel Aviv University holds an ancient tooth that was found at an archeological site near Rosh Haain, Central Israel

A news scientific discovery may force libraries to burn some old biology books on the evolution of modern man from their shelves. Scientists have just discovery a 400,000-year-old human remains which raises a lot of questions.

Previously, researchers believed that homo sapiens, which are the direct descendants of modern man, evolved in Africa about 200,000 years ago and gradually migrated north, through the Middle East, to Europe and Asia.

The new discovery, which came out from a study by an Israeli university researchers could compel scientists to revise the earlier theories.

Archeologists from Tel Aviv University say eight human-like teeth found in the Qesem cave near Rosh Ha’Ayin – 10 miles from Israel’s international airport – are 400,000 years old, from the Middle Pleistocene Age, making them the earliest remains of homo sapiens yet discovered anywhere in the world.

The size and shape of the teeth are very similar to those of modern man. Until now, the earliest examples found were in Africa, dating back only 200,000 years.

The report which is published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, suggest that modern man did not originate in Africa as previously believed, but in the Middle East.

The teeth is the part of the human skeleton that survive the longest.

The researchers hope to make more discoveries that would shed further light on human evolution in prehistoric times.
In conclusion, the “Out of Africa” theory will be subjected to strong debate in the days and years ahead.

December 27, 2010January 19, 2011

Ingestion of ‘modified’ starch could be a new malaria vaccine strategy

Electron microscope image showing starch (white shell) containing a peptide of Plasmodium (black dots of gold particles) coupled with the GBSS of the green algae Chlamydomona. Credit:Stan Tomavo, CNRS

There is no efficient vaccine against malaria, although nasal and oral vaccination seems to be the most promising and suitable solution in countries where the parasite Plasmodium, which causes the disease, is rife. Researchers from two laboratories in northern France have successfully vaccinated and protected mice by feeding them starch derived from green algae and genetically modified to carry vaccine proteins. These encouraging results, which make it possible to envisage a simple and safe vaccination for children in countries at risk, are available online, on the scientific journal PloS One’s website.

According to the WHO, malaria affects approximately 300 to 500 million people worldwide and kills one million each year, mostly young children. Insecticide-resistant mosquitoes carrying the disease and multi-drug resistant parasites are on the increase. In this context, the development of a vaccine that alleviates symptoms and reduces mortality would be a valuable new tool in the fight against malaria. Researchers aim to test the efficacy of vaccine candidates among proteins that allow the parasite to penetrate host cells and infect them, in order to devise the best strategy for vaccine delivery.

Researchers from the Centre d’Infection et d’Immunité de Lille and the Unité de Glycobiologie Structurale et Fonctionnelle have developed a new vaccine strategy based on the ingestion of genetically modified starch. They used antigens that have shown their efficacy in “conventional” vaccinations as vaccine candidates. They fused these antigens to an enzyme (GBSS) in a starch granule from the green algae, Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. This enzyme has the particularity of functioning inside the starch granule and of being protected, along with the antigens grafted to it, against degradation by other enzymes. In this way, the researchers were able to produce several murine and human antigens of Plasmodium within starch grains. These grains were then ingested by mice inoculated with the parasite. The researchers demonstrated that the mice were vaccinated by the starch grains, which significantly protected them against infection.

Starch is the insoluble and semi-crystalline polysaccharide that is the most commonly found in photosynthetic organisms. A starch grain can easily be produced from a plant extract and purified, in large quantities. It has a very stable structure and can be stored for months with no particular precaution, even if it undergoes temperature variations. It is easily assimilated through digestion and has a major ecological and financial interest, with very low production costs.

The starch of edible plants could be transformed in the same way as that of the algae Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. Researchers are thus looking at the possibility of using starch from multi-cellular algae used in Africa as a food supplement, but also from maize and potatoes. Administered to children under 3 years of age, who are at high-risk of malaria-related mortality, such plants could be both a food source and a vaccine. This strategy would allow simple vaccination, avoid storage problems and syringes, and thus eliminate potential HIV contamination.

The vaccine strategy based on the ingestion of genetically modified starch is protected by a patent.

The researchers now plan to test the efficacy of various Plasmodium antigens and determine whether such strategy can be applied to humans by verifying it has no side effects.

physorg.com

More information: PloS One, 15 December 2010: http://www.plosone … pone.0015424 .

December 21, 2010December 22, 2010

One for two: Africa has two species of elephants

If at high school biology you were taught that there are two species of elephants — the African and the Asian —it’s time to forget that.

A new research shows that the “African elephant” is actually two species. These two species are as evolutionarily different as goat and sheep are from one another. It’s a surprising degree of divergence that has just been reported.

The study, published in this week’s issue of the journal PLoS Biology was conducted by teams from Harvard, the University of Illinois and the University of York in Britain. The evolutionary divergence was identified by analyzing the DNA of the living elephant species and two of their extinct evolutionary cousins, the woolly mammoth and mastodon.

The study suggests the species separated several million years ago, about the same time that humans diverged from chimps.

The forest elephant is smaller, and is sometimes referred to as the “dwarf African elephant,” standing at about 8.2 feet high compared with the savanna elephant’s 11.5 feet, and weighing about half as much. The forest elephant also has straighter tusks and oval-shaped ears.

The savanna elephant weighs between 6 and 7 tons, roughly double the weight of the forest elephant.

The African elephant is listed as endangered by the U.S. Endangered Species Act, and splitting the population into two different species places the forest elephant in much more dreadful category.

December 16, 2010January 8, 2011

Text messaging to combact malaria

Mobile phones could soon be helping re-assure Nigerians and Ghanaians they are getting genuine medicine.

A pilot scheme in the two nations has begun putting unique scratch codes on more than 500,000 medicine bottles and packets of pills.

When the code is texted to a free phone number, a return message will reveal that a drug is genuine.

The scheme hopes to boost efforts to tackle diseases such as malaria and combat the rise in fake medicines.

Security alert

About 700,000 people suffering from malaria and tuberculosis die every year around the world because of fake drugs, suggest statistics from think tank International Policy Network

Globally, about 10-15% of all drugs are believed to be fake but in some parts of Africa this rises to 50%. The problem is made more acute in Africa because some fake medicines being offered to the sick are watered down versions of the real thing and dent the efficacy of the full strength drug.

“Some genuine medicines have lost their potency because of the counterfeiting,” said Gabriele Zedlmayer, a spokeswoman for HP which is a partner in the labelling scheme.

Fake pills are a big problem in Africa where diseases such as malaria are endemic

This can be a particular problem with malaria as the disease is so widespread in sub-saharan Africa where it is the leading cause of death.

The scheme is being backed by governments and drug companies who have pledged to publicise how it works in pharmacies, surgeries, hospitals and community centres.

Painkillers, anti-malaria drugs and amoebicides from pharmaceutical firms May & Baker in Nigeria and Kama in Ghana will be the first to get the scratch-off labels.

Such a scheme was very important in Africa where about 80% of medicines are generic, said Bright Simons, founder of mPedigree which developed some of the technology to underpin the pilot.

By using the codes, people would get to know pharmacies, hospitals and other outlets they can trust, he said.

Mobiles were the best way for people in Nigeria and Ghana to find out about their medicines because they were so ubiquitous said Mr Simon, adding that even those who do not own a handset themselves can get access via friends and family.

Each packet or bottle has a scratch-off code that can be used only once, said Mr Simons. The security system behind the scenes flags any attempt to re-use codes. As well as letting people know they are getting genuine medicine, it will also alert people when fake medicines are being peddled.

If the pilot proves successful, the scheme will be extended to cover more than six million bottles and packets in the next 12 months.

“This is just the first step,” said Ms Zedlmayer. “It can be applied to any kind of medication.”

(Story by BBC)

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December 13, 2010January 2, 2011

Africa has potential to solve own problems, Canadian Researchers say

Amy Husser, Postmedia News

A young girl receives a vaccine on November 23, 2009 in Monrovia, Liberia in a file photo. Photograph by: Glenna Gordon, AFP/Getty Images

In spite of a global perception as being “dependent, pestilence-ridden and suffering,” Africa has the ingenuity and conviction to solve its own health problems, Canadian researchers say in a sweeping new look at the continent.

A team of researchers conducted hundreds of interviews in nearly 100 locations across sub-Saharan Africa to offer a “unique microscope” on neglected health problems for Afica.

The “landmark collection” of papers — published Sunday in the U.K.-based BioMed Central — outlines 25 innovative health technologies they say deserve more attention.

The researchers paint Africa as a hub of innovation, being held back only by finances and cultural biases, resulting in a lack of access to global markets.

“The bottom line is there’s a lot more ideas and talent in Africa . . . than there are products on the market helping people improve their health,” says Peter Singer, director of the McLaughlin-Rotman Centre for Global Health, which conducted the research.

“In the long term, the sustainable solutions to Africa’s health problems rest with the home team.”

According to lead researcher Ken Simiyu, the 25 technologies are considered “stagnant” because they languish in African health institutes instead of being converted into a viable product or service for local markets.

Examples include a portable medical-waste incinerator created in Kenya that can cut down on byproducts produced during mass vaccinations in rural areas, or a Ghana-developed diagnostic test for schistosoma, a parasitic disease that affects as much as 50 per cent of the population in some areas of Africa.

And in Kenya, scientists have isolated human odours that effectively repel mosquitos; an adapted insecticide could cut down on malaria, which kills nearly one million people — mostly African children — annually.

“What is holding them back is they have not been able to get a commercial partner who can transform these chemical entities . . . into a product that is really deliverable to the market,” said Simiyu.

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