Satellite, Digital X-Rays Used To Fight MalariaSatellite, Digital X-Rays Used To Fight Malaria

There are now high-tech weapons in the fight against malaria -- a combination of digital X-ray and satellite technology -- that scientists are hoping will help researchers thousands of miles away monitor the effectiveness of the vaccine.

Over the last 20 years, pharmaceutical maker GlaxoSmithKline has spent $300 million to develop a vaccine against malaria, which kills more than 1 million young children each year. With additional funding of $100 million provided recently by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the vaccination will soon enter an important new phase of trial testing in remote "malaria belt" African countries.

GlaxoSmithKline Biologicals recently completed an initial phase of the trial testing, which involved a few hundred African children. But at the end of March or early April, the company will launch the next phase of trial testing for the vaccination over the next four years, involving 16,000 children in 11 remote clinics in seven African nations.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 350 million to 500 million malaria cases occur worldwide each year, resulting in more than a million deaths, mostly of young children in Africa south of the Sahara.

In what GlaxoSmithKline officials believe is a first for using satellite technology in a pharmaceutical project of this size, patient clinical data and digital X-ray images will be transmitted directly from the 11 African locations, via GE Satlynx geosynchronous NSS-7 satellite dishes, to a ground station in Europe, and from there to GSK's remote data entry system called e-N@ble, over a secure virtual private network.

"There is no copper or cable infrastructure" available in those very rural locations in the African bush, said Neil Darwent, director of IT, global clinical R&D and vaccination development at GSK. Many of those participating clinics have electrical power only via generators for the equipment and the PCs that will be used to collect the data.

"Many of the parents will bring their children to these clinics by foot, walking for days," he said.

The use of this type of satellite technology for transmitting data more typically occurs in mining and oil exploration, Darwent said. The approximately $100 million in funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation -- which has made stamping out malaria one of its top missions -- helped purchase the Philips digital X-ray equipment, which will be used to take approximately 4,000 chest X-ray images during the trial so that GSK researchers can track the health of those participating patients.

"If a child has a fever, we need to determine if it's malaria," said Darwent, explaining why the X-rays are so important to the project.

The children participating in the double-blind pilot will include those receiving placebo treatment and those receiving three vaccinations. Researchers won't be told during the trial which children have received the placebo or test vaccine.

The children will be tracked over four years and will be between the ages of "zero and four months" when they begin the trial, Darwent said.

"We need statistical data to show the effectiveness" of the vaccination, said Roger Cooper, GSK project manager. Without the ability for the clinics to digitally transmit the X-ray images and clinical data, and instead having to rely on film or paperwork being sent to researchers, "would be a big step backwards, we're a leader in the use of electronic data," Cooper said. Paper-based data from the clinics would cause time delays in the researchers' collection of information, as well as open the door to mistakes when data is entered later, he said.

Much of the malaria vaccination research is being done in Belgium and so European regulators will be evaluating the trial data for eventual approval of the vaccination for mass distribution. If the trial is a success, that could come in 2014.

GSK's use of the satellite in the malaria vaccine project "is the first of several trials" that will utilize the technology, said Darwent. "Now that we know how to use it we'll use it for other trials," including vaccinations and treatments for other diseases such as HIV and tuberculosis, he said.

The cost of satellite technology in general "has fallen in the last few years" making it more affordable for these endeavors, said Cooper. "The value is in the number of lives" it can help save, he said.

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