What kind of ethical issues were you thinking about? I'm not an expert on organising clinical trials but here's how I think it could go: unless they need other smaller trials to check other things, the main task of the next trial would be confirming the efficacy of the vaccine while still keeping a close eye on the safety.

So they would have more participants and possibly a longer trial period. One group would receive the vaccine, the control group would receive an injection of saline (and wouldn't know that it's saline). Then, perhaps, the participants would just go about their lives and come back for check ups every now and then. The clinicians would then compare how many people get malaria in the control versus vaccinated group. For this they would use complicated statistical analysis to compare how many people get infected in each group.

Nobody would be infected on purpose, they would just try to see if any of the "real life infections" are prevented. And the control group would be no worse off than they would be without taking part in the trial.

The only downside of this approach? It would require a lot of participants and thus such trial would cost a lot. Also, it wouldn't give sensational headlines such as 100% efficacy ;)

It's great to hear that we're making progress on HIV vaccine, however, this is yet another exciting headline which doesn't reflect the reality of the study.

The key is that out of 15 patients who received the vaccine booster,in 10 of the participants, the virus rapidly bounced back. Five participants have no detectable virus 7 months, 6, 14, 19 and 21 weeks.

So for the majority of the participants the vaccine in it's current form failed. The rest have been free from virus a really short time, it could still reappear. Indeed, the New Scientist article, which this article was based upon, mentions cases of the virus returning months and even years after other reported "cures".

Let's hope for the best and wait for the results of the follow ups and other clinical trials. Yet, be careful of those sensational headlines.

This is an exciting development, however, once again media is trying to make a sensation out of preliminary science. The vaccine prevented infection in 9 out of 9 (!!!!) volunteers ten weeks after the vaccination. Nine is an extremely small number of volunteers and this kind of trials primary tests the preliminary safety before larger trials. And while it gives hope, there's also a good chance that the vaccine will fail in a larger trial. Could be many things - with more testing, it could reveal toxicity, or lack of efficacy in larger groups of people, or it could stop working at week eleven after the vaccination. It's good to hear about the progress of science but let's not forget that science can be really tough and that there's many things that could go wrong before we actually have an effective malaria vaccine.

This is a very interesting read and fascinating science. However, as it often happens, the reporting of this science is slightly misleading. First things first - this shows promising research in mice, however, quite frequently the research advances in mice do not work well in humans. They did some research using human cells but not quite enough to claim that we can get to human trials within 10 years, I'd say it will take more than 20 instead. Furthermore, there is a risk of tumours when these factors are used and while they acknowledge that and report that they did not observe any tumours in these mice, this will be a major safety issue before we can try something like this out in humans. Once again, this practically ensures that other major scientific breakthroughs are needed before such therapies can be tried out in humans. Great science, wish the reporting could explain things a bit better and avoid the temptation of clickbaity titles and claims.