Malaria is a leading cause of death worldwide, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Of late, the Gates Foundation has been pouring money into relief efforts, but it's a disease of monumental proportions.
As such, any movement forward is of huge importance. So it's good to note that immune researchers out of the Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute "have for the first time produced a malarial protein ... to generate a significant immune response in mice and non-human primates for use in a potential transmission-blocking vaccine," according to a release put out by the university.
The big news here is that the research teams was able to make a vaccine that "blocked the sexual development of the malaria-causing parasite, Plasmodium, as it grows within the mosquito," according to the release. Without sexual development, the parasite is dead in the water, or the blood, in this case.
“Development of a successful transmission-blocking vaccine is an essential step in efforts to control the global spread of malaria," said Nirbhay Kumar, Ph.D., senior author of the study. His affiliation is a mouthful, to say the least. He's a professor in Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s W. Harry Feinstone Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology. "This approach provides a compelling rationale and basis for testing a transmission-blocking vaccine in humans,” Kumar added.
The Hopkins researchers used E. coli bacteria to produce the protein that makes the vaccine work. After trying the vaccine out on mice in the lab, they moved on to baboons in Kenya. According to the study, "a single-dose vaccine provided a 93 percent transmission-blocking immune response, reaching greater than 98 percent after a booster given several months later."
The idea here is that vaccines, treatments and prevention measures could be combined to wear away at the parasite. Instead of a knock-out cure, public health officials could further reduce malaria's range every year until, as was the case with small-pox and polio, it is more contained than eradicated.
Kumar pointed out that much more research is needed before the vaccine could be tried in humans. The team's study was published in the July 22 edition of the journal PLoS One.
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