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Vaccine for malaria may be in the offing!

malaria causing mosquito 4515
The deadly disease malaria has been ailing human civilisation for a long time now. It is a public health problem in more than 90 countries and reckoned as the world’s most important parasitic disease. It kills more people than HIV or any other communicable disease except tuberculosis. It infects 400 million people every year and kills one person every 30 seconds, with the vast majority under five years old.

Now, just over 100 years since Britain’s Sir Ronald Ross was awarded the Nobel Prize for finally proving that malaria is transmitted by mosquitoes, researchers at the University of Nottingham believe they have made a significant breakthrough in the search for an effective vaccine to deal with the deadly disease.
Dr Richard Pleass, from the Institute of Genetics, said:

“Our results are very, very significant. We have made the best possible animal model you can get in the absence of working on humans or higher primates, as well as developing a novel therapeutic entity.”

Using blood from a group of people with natural immunity to the disease, a team from the School of Biology refined and strengthened the antibodies employing a new animal testing system which, for the first time, imitates in mice the way malaria infects humans. When injected into mice, these antibodies protected them against the disease.

According to WHO, the dream of the global eradication of malaria is beginning to fade with the growing number of cases, rapid spread of drug resistance in people and increasing insecticide resistance in mosquitoes. Until now there has been no reliable animal model for human malaria. Mice do not get sick when infected with the blood-borne parasite that causes malaria in people and the immune system of mice shows a different response to humans when it comes into contact with the parasite.

This implied that despite making a promising antibody vaccine that worked against the parasite in a lab dish, the team could not test it in a living animal.

In a new study published in the journal PLoS Pathogens an open access journal published by the Public Library of Science – Dr Pleass and his collaborators in London, Australia and The Netherlands describe how they solved the problem by creating a mouse model of the human malaria infection.
The team, which was funded by the Medical Research Council and the European Union, is now expecting to refine the model with a view to starting the first phase of clinical trials in humans.

Image Credit: nationalgeographic.com

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