At the Malaria Forum hosted by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in October, the latest findings on what is currently the most viable malaria vaccine candidate in medical history, known as RTS,S, were announced.

By our TopPartner allAfrica.com

Amidst the videotaping, camera flashes, Tweeting and blogging, Dr Patricia Wamboi Njuguna awaited her turn at center stage at the Seattle forum. The only African woman in a team of 22 principal investigators on the Phase III trial of RTS,S, Njuguna couldn't give in to jet-lag after 24 hours of travel through five time zones. She couldn't afford to be nervous or hesitant. After all, she was representing not only the African scientists involved in this historic research, but all African scientists, of which women are a tiny minority.

And Njuguna also knew that after the pomp and ceremony of the Gates Foundation event, back home in Kenya, yet another a series of media interviews awaited her.

"It was such a hectic time. I spoke a lot more than I am used to," Njuguna recalls, laughing. "The best part of it all was the response of the community in Kilifi whose children were enrolled in the study. People were very excited by those findings."

And they should be. The October 18th announcement on the RTS,S vaccine candidate, produced by GlaxoSmithKline, found that it reduced the risk of clinical malaria by 56 percent, and severe malaria by 47 percent, in studies involving 6,000 children in 11 trial sites in Africa. The analysis was performed on data from children aged five to 17 months, during the 12 months after they received the vaccine.

Though researchers and global health officials quickly acknowledged that the data is just a milepost towards the ultimate goal of a licensed, effective vaccine, excitement about the data was palpable. The results were heralded in news outlets around the world, and many observers linked the research to the potential for many African nations to reach one of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals of reducing child mortality.

Njuguna, who headed the trial at the Kilifi, Kenya, site, spoke to AllAfrica.com about what sparked her interest in science and her role in the historic RTS,S project.

"My father was a plant breeder and director of the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute in Thika. We lived within the center and often got to see him at work on papaya and Valencia oranges," Njuguna said. "I always thought I would end up in agricultural research. But he advised me to try medicine instead."

So after high school at Bishop Gatimu Ngandu girls in Karatina, Njuguna joined the University of Nairobi for undergraduate medical training in 1992. During her fifth year, Njuguna spent six weeks at the KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Research Programme in Kilifi.

"I did a small project supervised by Professor Charles Newton, which was my very first exposure to clinical research," she said. "I found the process of research interesting, the exercise of attempting to answer scientific questions in this way, challenging."

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