Two studies appearing this week in the New England Journal of Medicine note that an experimental vaccine appears to protect infants and young children against malaria.

The disease kills nearly a million people a year and sickens 250 million others for more than 70 years, according to the World Health Organization. At most risk are children in sub-Saharan Africa. The parasite causing malaria get inside the body causing fever and sometimes deadly brain infections.

The vaccine giving hope to million of people worldwide is produced by GlaxoSmithKline PLC with the support from the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative, a global nonprofit consortium that works with pharmaceutical companies.

The studies, both conducted in Kenya and Tanzania on about 1,200 children showed the vaccine was efficient 53 percent to 65 percent of the cases. Phase III clinical tests, the last stage before seeking regulatory approval, will begin next year. If everything is going as expected, marketing approval will be sought as early as 2011, the producer announced. The vaccine will then be given to babies in endemic countries as part of their regular pediatric immunizations.

Researchers see the success of the vaccine as a “hopeful beginning” in the fight with a deadly disease. But the vaccine needs to be tested in countries with higher rates of malaria, William Collins and John Barnwell, malaria experts at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, wrote in a commentary accompanying the studies in The New England Journal of Medicine.

The findings of the studies were presented Monday at a New Orleans meeting of the American Society for Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.