jwatowatson / tafenoquine-efficacy

Characterising the mg/kg efficacy of single dose tafenoquine

Tafenoquine-efficacy

The clinical pharmacology of tafenoquine in the radical cure of Plasmodium vivax malaria: an individual patient data meta-analysis

This github repo provides code underlying the analysis of our paper published in eLife (in press, preprint version with peer review comments). The data cannot be made open access as they belong to GSK. They can be obtained by submitting a data request to the CSDR website.

This work characterises the relationship between the mg/kg dose of tafenoquine and recurrence at 4 months. We show that the tafenoquine dose is the primary determinant of efficacy; that day 7 methaemoglobin is a predictor of efficacy; that more rapid elimination of the parent compound is a predictor of efficacy. All plots in the paper are generated using the RMarkdown script TQ_efficacy.Rmd.

Higher doses of tafenoquine are needed for radical cure

The main result is the following Emax model fit:

The currently recommended dose (300 mg, approx 5 mg/kg in the median weight adult) results in approximately 70% of maximal obtainable effect. Increasing the dose to 450 mg would reduce recurrences by half.

Any questions please email me at jwatowatson at gmail dot com