R21 / Matrix M vaccine

In news: A malaria vaccine candidate tested on children in West Africa has shown an efficacy of around 77 per cent.

About the vaccine-

The R21/Matrix-M vaccine, is developed by the Clinical Research Unit of Nanoro (CRUN), Burkina Faso and their partners at the University of Oxford in the UK.
It is the first malaria vaccine to reach the 75 per cent efficacy target set by the WHO.
The subjects in the study reported no serious side effects from the vaccine, which was found to be safe and can be manufactured at low cost on a large scale.
The Serum Institute of India has manufactured the vaccine and will deliver more than 200 million doses of the vaccine once it is approved by regulators.
It is a modified version of RTS,S which is another candidate against malaria that has been in development for more than 30 years.
RTS,S is developed by Walter Reed Institute of Research, GlaxoSmithKline and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative.
This vaccine is designed to stop the Plasmodium falciparum malaria parasite from entering the liver and preventing the subsequent deadly blood stages.
It targets the liver stage protein of the Plasmodium falciparum life cycle.
RTS,S is the first, and to date the only, vaccine to reduce malaria in children but is not highly efficacious.

Statistics-

Children under the age of 5 in sub-Saharan Africa accounted for approximately two-thirds of global deaths.
Between 2000 and 2020, 24 countries reported zero indigenous cases of malaria for 3 or more years.
This is the benchmark for the WHO certification of a country as malaria-free.
Globally, 39 countries have achieved the milestone.
In 2019, India had an estimated 5.6 million cases of malaria compared to about 20 million cases in 2020 according to WHO