IT HAS taken only a month but one research discovery has built on another to deliver a malaria vaccine. If proven effective it could enter human trials in two to three years and help prevent the more than 750,000 deaths caused annually by the disease.
Scientists at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute near Cambridge last month published their discovery of how the deadly malaria-causing parasite Plasmodium falciparum invades red blood cells to cause disease. It “unlocks” and enters the cell using a protein called RH5.
Now a team of scientists including a leading Irish researcher at the Jenner Institute at the University of Oxford have used RH5 as a vaccine target to wipe out the parasite.
Dubliner Prof Adrian Hill is director of the Jenner Institute, but colleague Dr Simon Draper is lead author in a report on the research published yesterday in Nature Communications.
“It is only pre-clinical studies but the biology of this looks very promising,” Prof Hill said yesterday. “It could be the missing component we need to make a highly effective vaccine.”
Working with the original group and the Kenyan Medical Research Institute in Kilifi, Kenya, the researchers discovered that RH5 changes very little between the various strains of the parasite, which cause nine out of 10 deaths from malaria. This means a single vaccine would protect against all the parasite’s deadly forms.
Clinical testing is expected in as little as two years.