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Interdasting. A Vaccine study?
https://archive.ph/DSi0b
New Study Reveals a Highly Protective Malaria Vaccine Candidate
Malaria, a mosquito-borne disease, poses substantial health risks to millions of people globally and can be fatal. It remains a significant global health threat. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), in 2018, there were approximately 228 million cases of malaria that resulted in 405,000 deaths worldwide[1], and children under five years old accounted for 67 percent of the deaths[2]. The malaria parasite has a complex multi-stage life cycle expressing thousands of variable proteins, which has hindered researchers in their efforts to develop an effective malaria vaccine. Butnew research from CAMRIS International,Inc., in collaboration with the Naval Medical Research Center (NMRC), the Henry M. Jackson Foundation for the Advancement of Military Medicine (HJF), the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR), and the University of Maryland School of Medicine, reveals a highly protective novel malaria antigen, Plasmodium yoelii (Py) E140 (PyE140).
In the study, the researchers evaluated a novel antigen using the P. yoelii (a rodent parasite commonly used to study malaria infection) challenge of mice and found that a single dose immunization with the E140 antigen results in long-term sterilizing protection statistically associated to antibody responses. Given that this unprecedented protection is mediated by durable antibodies killing the parasite in the blood, the E140 offers not only the prospect of preventing malaria but also to treat the malaria infection itself. Further, the E140 antigen, a CAMRIS invention, is highly conserved amongst P. falciparum parasites from endemic regions, the deadliest species of the parasite that causes most malaria fatalities in humans. These findings strongly indicate that the E140 antigen is a leading malaria vaccine candidate for humans.
Dr. Joao Aguiar, the CAMRIS malaria team lead, asserted, “We are very excited with this remarkable discovery and the prospect of developing the E140 malaria vaccine. Over the last 30 plus years, malaria research has not produced a highly effective and durable vaccine, but the data we have generated shows that E140 has these two features that are unprecedented in malaria antigen discovery.”
Read the paper in PLOS One.
References
[1] “Malaria.” World Health Organization. www.who.int/malaria/en/ (accessed May 2020).
[2] World Malaria Report. Geneva: World Health Organization; 2019. License: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO.