Asset Publisher

Newsroom News
Research, Maternal, Child and Reproductive Health

The MiPPAD Project Enters Its Final Phase

Researchers from the MiPPAD project review the preliminary results of the MiPPAD clinical trials in two meetings held in Barcelona

19.06.2013

Every year, approximately 25 million pregnant women are exposed to Plasmodium falciparum malaria. While Intermittent Preventive Treatment in pregnancy (IPTp) can reduce neonatal mortality by over 60%, more interventions are needed to further reduce the burden of malaria in pregnant women. The MiPPAD (Malaria in Pregnancy Preventive Alternative Drugs) project, which was launched in November 2008 and is now entering its final phase, was designed to compare the safety and efficacy of mefloquine and the currently recommended drug for IPTp, sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine, in order to contribute to the development of new clinical interventions to fight against malaria. The project is being coordinated by Dr. Clara Menendez, Director of the Maternal, Infant and Reproductive Health Initiative at ISGlobal.

Two meetings among different participants in the project were held in Barcelona this month to review the preliminary results of clinical trials involving over 5800 pregnant women. The trials were conducted between 2009 and 2013. The first meeting, held on 4-6 June, brought together members of the MiPPAD statistical group to review the statistical analyses performed to date. This was the fourth time that the group had met. A week later, MiPPAD researchers from participating centres in Benin, Gabon, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, Germany, France and Spain met, also for the fourth time, to review the preliminary results of the trials. The final results of the project will be presented at an internal meeting of expert reviewers at the headquarters of the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, in July.

The results will be made public at the 6th Multilateral Initiative on Malaria (MIM) Pan-African Malaria Conference in Durban, South Africa in October 2013 and at the Seventh Forum European & Developing Countries Clinical Trials Partnership Forum, to be held in Dakar, Senegal on 21-24 October.
 

Supported by:


This project is part of the EDCTP2 programme supported by the European Union