About severe malaria

A promising clinical development program with sevuparin is conducted in a research collaboration with Imperial College London and Wellcome to treat patients with severe malaria.

Severe malaria is a rapidly progressing, serious sepsis-like state caused by the parasite, predominantly in pediatric patients, and carrying a 10-20% mortality rate.  Like for sepsis, there is no specific treatment for severe malaria in addition to anti-parasitic drugs and the purpose with this collaborative program is to evaluate the potential benefit of sevuparin as an early response treatment in the intensive care setting. Imperial College London is conducting the first clinical trial of the collaboration out of their specialized site in Kelifi Kenya. In 2021, WHO estimated that there were 247 million cases of malaria worldwide with 619 000 deaths of which 80% were children. The African Region alone carried a disproportionate 95% of all malaria cases and 96% of all associated deaths, underlining the importance to center development of new treatments to this region.

The collaborations around malaria and the anemia projects constitute good examples of how Modus works with academic partners in long term joint efforts that eventually may lead into the clinic, either as in-house Modus programs or as so-called investigator initiated collaborative clinical studies.