Incredulity turns to praise as malaria vaccine posts positive PhI data

Monday, August 12, 2013

In the 1970s, experiments showed that volunteers developed immunity from malaria after irradiated infected mosquitoes bit them thousands of times. Understandably, this immunization method never went mainstream, but a vaccine based on the underlying science just might.

While an immunization method based on biting is impractical, Maryland-based biotech Sanaria saw there are other ways to get the irradiated parasites into people. Sanaria has spent the past decade harvesting parasites from the salivary glands of mosquitoes to use in malaria vaccines. The resulting vaccine uses a weakened form of the whole parasite to generate an immune response. Other malaria vaccine candidates use proteins found on the surface of the parasite, but, as Sanaria observed, these recombinant, subunit designs have had little success.

Phase I results of the Sanaria vaccine, called PfSPZ, suggest it could offer better protection. Data published in Science shows the six subjects who received five doses intravenously were 100% protected from infectious mosquito bites. In contrast, five of the six people in the control group contracted malaria. The data has excited the malaria research community. “The trial results constitute the most important advance in malaria vaccine development since the first demonstration of protection with radiation attenuated sporozoite immunization by mosquito bite in the 70s,” Seattle Biomedical Research Institute malaria researcher Stefan Kappe told Nature.

Source: FierceMarkets (link opens in a new window)

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Health Care
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infectious diseases