Malaria vaccines and long-acting monoclonal antibodies are moving rapidly from pipeline to program, and this new paper by Birkett and colleagues lays out a comprehensive value profile to help guide those decisions. The authors situate vaccines and prophylactic mAbs against a sobering backdrop: malaria still causes more than 0.5 million deaths each year, and recent gains in child survival have stalled or reversed in several high-burden countries. Since 2021, two malaria vaccines have received WHO recommendations and Gavi financing, with pilot introductions associated with a 13% reduction in all-cause mortality and a 22% decline in severe malaria hospitalizations among young children in Africa. Alongside these first-generation products, WHO has updated preferred product characteristics (PPCs) for next-generation vaccines and issued new PPC guidance for malaria mAbs, reflecting growing interest in new interventions that can prevent disease and death in young children and, increasingly, help drive transmission down at the population level.
The article presents a WHO-commissioned vaccine value profile (VVP) developed by experts from academia, multilateral agencies, product-development partnerships, and national programmes to synthesize current evidence on the potential public health, economic, and societal value of malaria vaccines and prophylactic mAbs in the pipeline. Rather than focusing on a single product, the VVP takes a holistic view across intervention types and use cases, aligning them with country priorities and WHO PPCs to inform future R&D, financing, and policy choices. By bringing together impact estimates (such as mortality and hospitalization reductions), programmatic considerations, and the broader value case, the framework is designed to support decision-makers—from national EPI and malaria programmes to manufacturers and global funders—in comparing product profiles, making product development and investment decisions, planning sustainable introduction strategies, and maximizing the contribution of both current and next-generation tools to malaria control and elimination efforts.
How can these findings be used?
By bringing together impact estimates (such as mortality and hospitalization reductions), programmatic considerations, and the broader value case, the framework is designed to support decision-makers—from national EPI and malaria programmes to manufacturers and global funders—in comparing product profiles, making product development and investment decisions, planning sustainable introduction strategies, and maximizing the contribution of both current and next-generation tools to malaria control and elimination efforts.
Thumbnail image credit: Gavi/2021/White Rhino Films-Lameck Orina
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