$1.4M grant to support development of malaria vaccine.

2004 AUG 4 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- The Institute for OneWorld Health has received a $1.4 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to support development of a vaccine for the prevention and treatment of malaria, including for infants and children in the developing world.

OneWorld Health has chosen to use part of its Gates Foundation grant to enter into a funded research arrangement with Sanaria Inc., a company that is developing a novel malaria vaccine.

In addition to funding research and development activities, over the next 12 months, OneWorld Health will provide to Sanaria regulatory consulting and expertise on the project.

This may include guidance in developing the quality assurance and quality control program for monitoring the manufacturing process, as well as planning for an Investigational New Drug application.

Sanaria, based in Rockville, Maryland, will conduct various studies to confirm that key vaccine components can be produced with the ultimate goal of meeting U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requirements.

Various independent studies conducted from the early 1970s through the late 1990s showed that exposure of human volunteers to the bites of mosquitoes infected with weakened (attenuated) malaria parasites, called sporozoites, protected more than 90% of those volunteers against developing malaria for at ...