View clinical trials related to Malaria.
Filter by:A prospective study will be carried out in an area where parasites with reduced sensitivity to malaria drugs (artemisinins) have recently emerged. The study will recruit participants from patients who attend the clinic with uncomplicated malaria and are treated with conventional artemisinin-combination therapies (ACT) as part of standard clinical care. From this population, we will select P. falciparum gametocyte carriers. Before, during and after ACT treatment, the transmission potential of artemisinin resistant and wild type infections will be assessed by microscopy, molecular methods, parasite culture and mosquito feeding assays. Parasite clearance will be determined in the first days (d0-3) after treatment. The study population will consist of passively recruited patients with uncomplicated P. falciparum malaria who are microscopy positive for gametocytes. Participants will be treated with conventional therapies for uncomplicated malaria without randomization: artemether-lumefantrine (AL) or dihydroartemisinin-piperaquine (DHA-PPQ). All doses are supervised. Parasite clearance is assessed ex vivo by ring-stage survival assays and by daily slides during the first days of treatment. Gametocyte carriage and gametocyte commitment/production will be determined for resistant and wild type infections before, during and after treatment. In addition, venous blood will be collected at three timepoints to assess transmission to mosquitoes before (d0), during (d2) and after treatment (d7). The total duration of participation will be 7 days, the primary endpoint will be the reduction in mosquito infection rates at d2 (artemether-lumefantrine) or d7 (dihydroartemisinin-piperaquine) compared to pre-treatment.
Seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC) is a highly effective community-based intervention to prevent malaria infections caused by Plasmodium falciparum in areas where the burden of malaria is high and malaria transmission is seasonal. SMC is commonly seen as a success story in the Sahel region, however, there are regions in east and southern Africa where malaria transmission is seasonal, and the burden is high. However, the same decision-making frameworks that was used in the Sahel are unlikely to be applicable to east and southern Africa due to higher pre-existing resistance to the drugs used, seasonality heterogeneity, contextual difference, and unknown cost-effectiveness, amongst others. This study aims to estimate the chemoprevention efficacy, potential upscale impact, acceptability, and feasibility of SMC with sulfadoxine-pyrimenthamine + amodiaquine (SP+AQ) medicines in Niassa Province in Mozambique. The study is divided into two separate components with different objectives which outputs feed into each other: a non-randomized controlled trial to estimate the chemoprevention efficacy of SP+AQ; and a qualitative study that will evaluate the feasibility and acceptability of the intervention. These will be the first studies analysing the chemoprevention efficacy, feasibility, acceptability, and potential scale-up impact of SMC in Niassa Province, Mozambique The outcomes of these studies aim to guide future policy changes at local, national, and international levels and potentially allow for a historically successful program to expand in a sustained and cost-effective way beyond the Sahel region.
The purpose of this study is to assess the antimalarial activity, pharmacokinetics, and safety of MK-7602 in healthy adults following Plasmodium falciparum (P. falciparum) infection.
This study will assess the durability of protection of a single immunisation with the Genetically Attenuated Parasite 2 (GA2) against controlled human malaria infection by rechallenging previously immunised and protected participants from the CoGA study (NCT05468606)
A cluster-randomized double-blinded control trial will be conducted in Uganda to demonstrate and quantify the protective efficacy (PE) of Mossie-GO, an active spatial repellent system disseminating transfluthrin, in reducing the prevalence of malaria in children ≤ 5 years of age, as determined by RDT positivity and confirmed by microscopy. The study's secondary objective is to measure the diversionary impact of the intervention on locally unprotected individuals and impact of the intervention on entomological correlates of transmission including vector densities, host seeking behaviour and insecticide resistance. This will be conducted using Centre of Disease Control (CDC) light traps in households, human landing catches and World Health Organisation (WHO) tube tests. Further data collection include household behavioural surveys, air sampling to quantify concentration of transfluthrin present in air, acceptability surveys and intervention safety monitoring. Recruited households will be monitored across baseline data collection and followed up for 2 disease transmission seasons, for up to 18 months. The devices will be distributed to all consented eligible households in the two study arms: intervention and control. Intervention arm devices will be provided with transfluthrin treated discs and refill transfluthrin discs at frequent enough intervals to provide sustained protection. Households in the control arm will receive blank discs with no active ingredient. Households will be asked to continue using other malaria prevention practices, such as the use of bed nets, as recommended by national policy.
This study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of the use of adapted insecticide-treated mosquito nets combined with extended DHA-PQ-based seasonal chemoprevention for all ages and behavior change communication in reducing the burden of malaria in relation to standards of protection and care among students (taalibés) in the daaras (Koranic schools) of Touba, Senegal.
Malaria remains a major health problem, especially among children living in sub-Saharan Africa where more than 90% of the disease and deaths occur. Adding to this high burden among the children is the co-existence of parasitic worms in their intestines and urinary tract. The combined infection of malaria and parasitic worms in these children has additive adverse effects of anaemia, poor physical and cognitive development, and death. Existing control programmes for the parasitic worms are operating sub-optimally despite the 2012 London Declaration on Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs) of achieving 75% treatment coverage by 2020. On the other hand, a malaria prevention programme, called Seasonal Malaria Chemoprevention (SMC), introduced in the same year as the London Declaration on NTDs has achieved more than 75% treatment coverage and prevented 75-85% of cases of uncomplicated and severe malaria in children. The remarkable success of SMC has led to the recent WHO recommendation for its extension to other at-risk age groups and in highly seasonal malaria transmission settings outside the Sahel region. This encouraging development supports the need to explore the possibility of integrating helminth control programmes with other successful delivery platforms such as SMC. However, limited empirical evidence exists on an integrated approach that integrated the control of malaria and parasitic worms in a safe, acceptable, easy-to-deliver and effective manner. To address this knowledge gap, the investigators conducted a randomised controlled trial in the first stage of this project to establish the feasibility and safety of integrating helminth control with SMC among Senegalese children. This second stage will assess the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of using SMC platform to deliver deworming drugs to preschool and school-aged children living in communities where the burden of malaria and parasitic worms is high in central Ghana. One thousand, two hundred children aged 1-14 years will be randomly assigned equally to two study communities where antimalarial (SMC) drugs and deworming drugs will be administered in combination to the children living in one study community, and antimalarial (SMC) drugs alone will be delivered to the children living in the second study community. The effectiveness of the combined delivery will be determined by checking whether the combined antimalarial and deworming drugs prevent anaemia in the children who receive the combined drugs compared to the children who receive antimalarial drugs only. We will also determine the cost and cost-effectiveness of this approach by estimating the incremental cost savings due to cases of moderate and severe anaemia averted by giving antimalarial and deworming drugs together to the children. The findings of this study would provide evidence to boost public health recommendations for an integrated control of malaria and parasitic worms among children living in the poorest countries of the world. The findings may also reinforce the empirical evidence that the future direction of healthcare systems in developing countries should be comprehensive health management rather than vertical management of a single disease.
The Cameroon PCPI study will measure the effect of the parasite genotypes associated with SP resistance on parasite clearance and protection from infection when exposed to SP. The total number of participants is expected to be 900 healthy between 3 to 5 years old who have no symptoms of malaria infection of which 450 children will be assigned to the SP group, 250 to the SPAQ group, and 200 to the AS group. The results of this study will allow to measure the effect of the parasite genotypes associated with SP resistance on parasite clearance and protection from infection when exposed to SP.
Controlled human malaria infection (CHMI) has revolutionized the development of malaria vaccines. It involves the administration of either known numbers of sporozoites or infected erythrocytes to healthy human volunteers under a controlled environment. The use of highly sensitive molecular malaria diagnostic methods informs treatment decisions before symptom development and allows the characterization of parasite growth dynamics. Sporozoite CHMI has safely been used in six countries in Africa providing a platform to assess the efficacy of candidate malaria vaccines and study the natural immunity to malaria. Blood stage CHMI involves administration of known number of Artemether Lumefantrine sensitive infected erythrocytes in healthy volunteers, and it is a more sensitive model for modelling parasite growths and study the efficacy of blood-stage malaria vaccines. It has been safely used in Australia and Europe but not in Africa. Adaptation of this model by administration of combination of suboptimal and optimal antimalarial drugs lead to increased gametocytaemia, and infection rates in mosquitoes following standard membrane feeding assay. Such adaptation allows the model to be used to study parasite transmission from human to mosquitoes and evaluate transmission blocking malaria interventions. There is an urgent need to establish an in vivo model for early-stage clinical evaluation of transmission blocking interventions (TBI) in volunteers living in malaria endemic countries. This would allow rapid and cost-effective way to down-select transmission blocking candidate malaria vaccine and gametocidal antimalarial drugs before larger, more complex, and expensive field efficacy studies are conducted. A study done in naïve individual showed 100% success in establishing a malaria infection using 2800 P. falciparum infected RBCs, while a recent study (manuscript in development) has demonstrated success in establishing infection in Tanzanian semi-immune individuals with low malaria exposure using 1000 P. falciparum infected RBCs. We will use 1000 ALU-sensitive 3D7 P. falciparum infected RBCs to establish an in vivo transmission model for studying Transmission blocking interventions and assess the efficiency of two antimalarial drugs regimens (Piperaquine and doxycycline) to induce high levels of gametocytaemia and mosquito infection rates in healthy African adults. We will also investigate the determinants of successful transmission to mosquitoes including underlying immune responses to both asexual and sexual malaria antigens, asexual parasite dynamics and gametocyte burden, sex ratio of male and female gametocytes, and the relationship between gametocyte density and mosquito infection rate
The Zambia PCPI study will measure the effect of the parasite genotypes associated with SP resistance on parasite clearance and protection from infection when exposed to SP. The total number of participants is expected to be 600 healthy between 3 to 5 years old who have no symptoms of malaria infection of which 400 children will be assigned to the SP group and 200 to the AS group. The results of this study will allow to measure the effect of the parasite genotypes associated with SP resistance on parasite clearance and protection from infection when exposed to SP.