The vaccine was created by Professor Pan Weiqing and a team of 15 other researchers from Shanghai Second Military Medical University, who spent the past six years developing the intravenous drug with funding from the WHO.

"There are no malaria vaccines right now. Shanghai's medical breakthrough would be the first one to prevent the disease," Marie-Paule Kieny, director of the WHO's Initiative for Vaccine Research, told Shanghai Daily yesterday.

Kieny and her Kenyan colleague Deborah Kioy flew in from Geneva to study plans for the first round of clinical trial on the drug -- called PfCP-2.9 -- which will begin at Changhai Hospital in Shanghai in a few weeks.

While the vaccine has already been certified by the State Drug Administration, Pan and his team had kept it a secret until yesterday while they applied for patents for the drug.

Pan will transfer the technology to Shanghai Wanxing Bio-Pharmaceutical Co, which hopes to begin mass production of the vaccine within three years.

"While there are few malaria cases in Shanghai, we consider it as a must to have a vaccine for preventing the fatal disease in other parts of China and the rest of the world," said Pan, head of the Department of Etiologic Biology at the university.

Malaria is one of the top three infectious diseases in the world, along with tuberculosis and AIDS, threatening more than 40 percent of the world's population, according to the WHO.

Every year, 300 million to 500 million people are infected with the disease, mostly pregnant women and children in Africa, South America and parts of Asia.

While there were some 30 million people suffering from the disease in China prior to 1949, there are only 300,000 cases of malaria in the country today.

The WHO has signed an agreement with Wanxing to ensure the vaccine is affordable, with the health organization supporting the first round of clinical trials.

(Eastday.com February 14, 2003)